University of Ljubljana

The Laboratory for Molecular Microbiology of the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana (UL) (Ljubljana, Slovenia) is the leading centre in the HPV research in Slovenia. Aside from performing routine clinical diagnostic of HPV in national cervical cancer screening programme, the Department has also a research focus on the development and clinical evaluation of HPV molecular tests, including triage strategies, and is conducting studies of molecular epidemiology of HPV on a global level. The Department currently consists of five fulltime PhD candidates and post-doctoral researches. In the last 25 years, Slovenian HPV researches have been actively and successfully incorporated in the international HPV community and have contributed small but significant achievements in the field. The team at the University of Ljubljana will be involved in workpackages 2, 3 and 6.

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Prof. M. Poljak

Prof. Mario Poljak, MD, PhD is Head of the Laboratory for Molecular Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana and for more than 25 years one of the leading HPV researchers in Eastern/Central Europe. He was president of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) with 9,000+ members (2016–2018) and a member of the ESCMID Executive Committee (2012–2020). His bibliography comprises more than 2,000 bibliography units, of which 320 are research studies and expert publications in scientific journals included in the Science Citation Index. His papers received more than 12,000 citations (h index=52).

Publications

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Dr. Oštrbenk Valenčak

Dr. Anja Oštrbenk Valenčak is a microbiologist at the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology at Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her primary research interest is the role of human papillomaviruses (HPV) in the pathogenesis of different benign and malignant tumours, development of new molecular diagnostic methods, improvement and evaluation of virological methods/assays for detection of HPV and cancer prevention. Throughout her career and extensive research in field of molecular diagnostics, she was a coordinator of the several European and other national and international projects and published over 30 papers in peer-reviewed publications.

Publications