Our Story

We are Infectotrópico

It all began when Dr. José Antonio Suárez, known as Tony Suárez, decided early in his career in Venezuela to devote himself to caring for patients with neglected and tropical diseases. For more than 20 years, together with Dr. Laura Naranjo, first at the JM de los Ríos Children's Hospital in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases graduate program and later as faculty at the Institute of Tropical Medicine of the Central University of Venezuela, he built a clinic for patients with tropical diseases alongside other colleagues from that Institute's Infectious Diseases Section.

In 2010, because of the political situation in Venezuela, Tony and Laura decided to leave the country and settle in Panama City, where Laura worked in vaccine medical affairs management and Tony began working at the Gorgas Memorial Institute for Health Studies as an advisor, researcher and teacher of tropical diseases. There he rekindled his passion for teaching and sparked a particular interest in this field in some of his students. That is how Dr. Mónica Pachar, Dr. José Anel González and Dr. Roderick Chen from Panama, Cristian Olivo from Venezuela and Nathan Gundacker from the USA joined the team. Dr. Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, a Venezuelan parasitologist and pathologist and a former student of Tony's, who was forced by migration to leave Venezuela for New York, became Director of Molecular Biology at Mount Sinai Hospital. Yamilka Díaz, MSc, a biologist at the Gorgas Memorial Institute, and Dr. Griselda Arteaga, a biotechnologist at the University of Panama, both Panamanian, joined the field and laboratory work. This consolidated a multidisciplinary team of health professionals built on the One Health concept who, with the support of academia, science and decades of accumulated experience, decided to join forces and contribute their knowledge to research, teaching and consulting in the management of tropical and neglected diseases, essential for scientific progress in this field and as a contribution to the global initiative to eradicate these diseases. And so Tony and Laura's dream of continuing the tropical medicine teaching they had done in Venezuela began to come true, and Infectotrópico was born.

Our Team

Experts in the field for more than three decades

We combine clinical diagnosis and laboratory support with geographic knowledge of endemic infectious and tropical diseases. We teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels across the biomedical fields in pursuit of excellence, building a close bond between academia and research.