Dr Bicanic joined St George’s as a Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Infectious Diseases in April 2013. Prior to this she undertook her pre-clinical medical training at Cambridge and clinical training at Oxford. Her specialist postgraduate clinical training in Microbiology and Infectious diseases was at St George's Hospital NHS Trust (2002-2009), where she has been a Consultant in Infectious Diseases since 2013.
Since 2004, together with colleagues from the Cryptococcal meningitis group at St George's, she has been involved in internationally-leading clinical and translational research in the field of invasive fungal infections. Since 2010, she has had her own laboratory and research group at St George’s. She was promoted to Reader in 2015 and Professor in 2023.
From 2004 - 2019, Dr Bicanic's research focus was on cryptococcal meningitis (CM) in patients with HIV/AIDS. She undertook phase II antifungal clinical trials, described the epidemiology and clinical complications of the disease in HIV-infected South African patients (2004-6). Her Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship explored the relationship between virulence factors (capsule, melanin, survival within macrophages and ex vivo human CSF) and genotype in clinical cryptococcal isolates with clinical presentation and outcome in human disease. She also performed the first genome-wide association study of susceptibility to disseminated cryptococcal disease in HIV-infected Southern African patients. She described the evolution and mechanism of cryptococcal resistance to fluconazole and showed how combination antifungal therapy can prevent this from occurring.
Since 2019, Dr Bicanic expanded her research portfolio to fungal infections occurring in patients on the Intensive Care unit (ICU), invasive candidiasis and invasive aspergillosis secondary to severe viral pneumonia (influenza and COVID). She was chief investigator of the AspiFlu study from 2019-22. Her current focus is on epidemiology and mechanisms of Candida resistance evolution in the ICU, as chief investigator of the CandiRes study in 4 UK ICUs.
Research team
Ben Caswall, Laboratory technician
Phoebe Allebone-Salt, Clinical Research fellow
Harriet Davidson, Clinical Research Fellow
Research Collaborators
Candida resistance/ candidaemia
CandiRes study PIs: Dagan Lonsdale, St George's NHS Trust; Duncan Wyncoll, Guys and St Thomas' Hospital; Rohit Saha, Kings College Hospital; Junjack Wong, Liverpool University Hospitals (all Intensive Care Consultants)
Microbiology co-Is: Silke Schelenz and Alireza Abdolrasouli, King’s College Hospital; Carolyn Hemsley, Guy’s and St Thomas’; Alex Howard, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Collaborators: Joe Standing, University College London; William Hope, Liverpool (PK/PD); Elaine Bignell, Neil Gow, Exeter University (mechanism); Lewis White, University Hospital Wales, Cardiff (treatment response biomarkers)
Cryptococcal resistance
Joe Heitman, Duke University; Robin Allshire, Edinburgh University