Dr Shazia Rafique is working as Associate Professor for Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology. She completed her PhD in Molecular Virology on "Generation of Infectious Hepatitis C Pseudo particles Containing Functional E1E2 Envelope Protein Complexes and
their neutralization Assay" from CEMB, University of the Punjab in 2011 under HEC indeginous PhD program. During her PhD research she won three travel grant awards worth 5000USD from IVI Korea, ICGEB India and NFID, USA. She worked as post doc fellow at LUMS School of Biological Sciences for two years. Her post doc research was based on the molecular characterization of CG97 gene of drosophila which is homologue of MLL5 gene in humans for treating early child hood leukemias. In 2014 She was selected for a course on protein purification fully sponsored by Cold Spring Harbor Labs, USA. Since 2016 she is part of prestigious CEMB family. Presently she is working on Study of Epigenetic control of PDE4 gene in glucose metabolism. Her research work also focuses on the development of therapeutic vaccines strategies against human papilloma virus induced cervical cancer.

Research interests
Hepatitis C Virus, Epigenetics, HCV induced type 2 diabetes, Human Papilloma Virus, Therapeutic Vaccines

 Selected Publications

1. Shazia Rafique, Basit Jabbar, Outi Sahalo,Muhammad Idrees, et al. Antigenic peptide prediction from E6 and E7 oncoproteins of HPV 16 and 18 for therapeutic vaccine design using immunoinformatics and MD simulation analysis 2018. Frontiers in Immunology.
   doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2018.03000. IF: 3
2. Shazia Rafique, Sadia Zahid, Idrees Khan et al. Genome wide methylation profiling of HCV pathogenesis to develop diabetes and diabetic complications. October 2020. Journal of Viral Hepatitis 28(8). DOI:10.1111/jvh.13417. IF: 3.561.
3. Hafiza Rida, Amjad Ali, Sadia Bibi, Hafiz Waqas, Shazia Rafique et al. Transcriptional Analysis of TP53 Gene in Chronic Hepatitis C Patients Treated with Sofosbuvir, Daclatasvir, Pegylated Interferon, and Ribavirin. April 2023. ASM Omega. DOI:1021/acsomega.3c00903
4. Genotypic distribution of human papillomavirus and phylogenetic analysis of E6 and E7 gene of HR-HPV variants isolated from Pakistani population. January 2023. Medicine102(2):e32651
5. Syed Zawar Shah, Bassit Jabbar, Usman Mirza, Amjad Ali, Shazia Rafique, Muhammad Idrees et al., An Immunoinformatics Approach to Design a Potent Multi-Epitope Vaccine against Asia-1 Genotype of Crimean–Congo Haemorrhagic Fever Virus Using the Structural Glycoproteins as a Target. December 2022. Vaccines11(1) DOI: 3390/vaccines11010061. IF: 7.8.
6. Javeria Rafique, Shazia /Rafique et al., Next-generation sequencing studies on the E1-HVR1 region of hepatitis C virus (HCV) from non-high-risk HCV patients living in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. November 2021 Archives of Virology166(Suppl 4):1-11. IF: 685.
7. Faiza Shams, Shazia Rafique et al., Advances in the role of HCV nonstructural protein 5a (NS5A) of 3a genotype in inducing insulin resistance by possible phosphorylation of AKT/PKB. April 2019 Scientific Reports 9(1) . DOI: 1038/s41598-019-42602-2. IF: 4.6
8. Maria Afzal, Amjad Ali, Shazia Rafique et al. Peripheral Expression of CXCL10 Gene in Chronic Hepatitis C Patients Treated with Sofosbuvir, Daclatasvir, and Ribavirin. June 2020. Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research 40(6). DOI: 10.1089/jir.2019.0185. IF: 3.488.
9. Mehwish Aftab, Irum Amin, Shazia Rafique, and Muhammad Idrees. Molecular epidemiology of hepatitis delta and hepatitis B viruses circulating in two major provinces (East and North-West) of Pakistan 2018. Infection, genetics and evolution. DOI: 1016/j. IF:4.393.
10. Muhammad Usman, Shazia Rafique· Amjad Ali · […] · Muhammad Idrees (2016) Towards peptide vaccines against Zika virus:Immunoinformatics combined with molecular dynamics simulations to predict antigenic epitopes of Zika viras 2016. Nature Scientific Reports in proteins 6:37313. IF: 4.6