Biography

Keyla C. Tumas, Ph.D., is an Intramural Research Training Award postdoctoral fellow in the Informatics Core within NCATS’ Division of Preclinical Innovation. She is also a project manager for CURE ID, a collaboration between NCATS and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). CURE ID enables health care providers, patients and care partners to share real-world data on repurposed drugs. This data is used to make hypotheses and possibly inform clinical trials.

Tumas joined NCATS in 2021 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Translational Science Interagency Fellowship program (NCATS and FDA). She supported the project “Repurposing for Neglected Infectious Diseases: Project Lifecycle From Bench to Translational to Regulatory Science.” She gained expertise on translational science and the potential of drug repurposing for diseases that are hard to treat. Tumas has supported various CURE ID projects, including work with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on implantation mycoses. Tumas aids in the development of the CURE ID website and mobile application. She also provides project management support for disease-specific focus areas of CURE ID. She also performed research on an assay screen for combination therapy against E. coli in NCATS’ Early Translation Branch. Tumas also worked with an antimicrobial resistance team at FDA.

Before joining NCATS, Tumas earned her doctorate in microbiology and immunology through the Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP) with Georgetown University and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/NIH. For her doctoral thesis, she used rodent models to study malarial anemia. More specifically, she studied and characterized the production and clearance of red blood cells. She also held multiple positions in the Graduate Student Council at NIH. Tumas received a Bachelor of Science in biology (minor in mathematics) from Ithaca College. She worked as a postbaccalaureate researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Gilead Sciences before taking part in the GPP.

Research Topics

Tumas’s research interests include using translational science and drug repurposing to help find possible treatments for less studied infectious diseases and rare diseases.