Volume 4, Issue 2 (2022)

Nathalie Khoueiry Zgheib, MD - Professor, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Pharmacogenetics lab American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine

I am thrilled to be the guest editor for the BAU Journal of Health and Wellbeing. The current issue covers a range of very important topics covering areas such as bone health. Herein, the authors investigate the community pharmacist knowledge, practice, and barriers regarding osteoporosis's prevention and the genetic susceptibility to osteoarthritis. The issue also covers relevant local and behavioral data on COVID-19 with one even tackling pharmacology, my specialty of interest. Furthermore, the authors tackle an important aspect related to our every day’s health; the food safety practices among food carts.

I am more specifically immersed in a specialized area of pharmacology being phamacogenetics (PGx), the study of inter-individual variations in DNA sequence related to drug response. Our research initially started PGx study with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) detection for targets known to influence drug outcomes by known mechanisms. We then moved to evaluate known SNPs but for new problems being drug toxicity, disease susceptibility or outcome. More recently, we were able to interrogate a much larger number of genetic variants with genotyping arrays, and collaborated to perform next-generation sequencing (NGS) on a larger number of blood samples from very well phenotyped cohorts or repositories. We then expanded into the field of toxico- and pharmacoepigenetics with translational studies spanning cell culture to epidemiological evaluations on peripheral blood and tissues.

Coming back to COVID-19, we have recently evaluated the role of ACE1 genetic polymorphisms and shown that people who have the ACE1 I allele are more prone to contract the virus, but once infected, patients with the ACE1 D allele have a more severe disease course. These results suggest that genotyping for ACE1 I/D can be used for risk stratification and of prognosis of COVID-19 patients

It is hoped that research results emanating from my research group and other investigators such as authors in this journal pave the way for better health and wellbeing to all.