Dr. Yoel Lubell

Yoel Lubell is the head of the Economics and Translational Research Group in the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, Thailand. The group builds on a range of expertise and backgrounds of its members, including health economics, clinical practice, and qualitative research, and focuses primarily on the evaluation of diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for infectious diseases from an economic perspective and in terms of their impact in real-life settings. The Group primarily works on health technology evaluations in real-life settings. Group members explore the cost-effectiveness of new interventions and their clinical, social and ethical implications, in close collaboration with relevant MORU departments and units, with the aim of bridging the gap between cutting edge health research and health policy and reduce the lead-in time between scientific results and implementation. The recent establishment of a sub-unit within the Department of Medical Research (DMR) in Yangon, for example, facilitated the interaction between our health economics and modelling work and led to outputs being directly provided to the DMR and the Myanmar national malaria control programme. One of the group’s current main focuses is evaluating biomarker tests for use in remote rural tropical settings. Building on recent laboratory based retrospective studies and field evaluation of CRP rapid tests, this will result in a randomized control trial for CRP guided treatment of febrile patients in primary care. Besides its own research, ETRG also supports health economic studies and early career researchers across the Major Overseas Programme Centres in Southeast Asia.