About the Editors
Editor
George P. Patrinos, PhD, University of Patras, Greece
George P. Patrinos is Director General and Director of Research of the Hellenic Pasteur Institute in Athens, Greece and Professor of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology in the University of Patras, School of Health Sciences, Department of Pharmacy in Patras, Greece. He also holds adjunct Full Professorships at Erasmus MC, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pathology (Clinical Bioinformatics Unit) in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and the United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Genetics and Genomics and since May 2023 he serves as the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the ASPIRE Abu Dhabi Precision Medicine Research Institute in Al-Ain, Abu Dhabi (UAE). He served for almost 7 years as Chair of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC) and for 12.5 years as Full Member and Greece’s National representative in the Committee for Human Medicinal Products, Pharmacogenomics Working Party of the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
George is the founder of the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy, the first officially established academic pharmacogenomics laboratory in Greece. His group has keen interest in research covering disciplines from wet and dry lab and public health genomics projects, all focusing on pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine. In particular, his research interests involve discovery work and clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics, with participation in several prospective pharmacogenomics clinical studies focusing in particular on psychiatry but also cardiology and oncology, genomics of rare disorders and transcriptional regulation of human fetal globin genes. Moreover, George’s group is internationally renowned for its involvement in developing National/Ethnic Genetic databases to document the genetic heterogeneity in different populations worldwide and of genome informatics tools to translate genomic information into a clinically meaningful format. Also, George’s group has a keen interest in public health genomics to critically assess the impact of genomics to society and public health.
George has more than 350 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, some of them in leading scientific journals, such as The Lancet, Lancet EBioMedicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Rev Genet, Nucleic Acids Res, Genes Dev, iScience. Also, he has co-authored and co-edited more than 15 textbooks, among which the renowned textbook “Molecular Diagnostics”, published by Academic Press, now in its 3rd edition. He is the Editor of “Translational and Applied Genomics” book series, published by Elsevier and the Editor-In-Chief of the prestigious Pharmacogenomics Journal (TPJ), published by Nature Publishing Group, while he is Associate Editor and member of the editorial board of several high impact scientific journals and a member of several international boards and advisory and evaluation committees.
Apart from that, George is the main co-organizer of the Golden Helix Conferences, an international meeting series on Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine with more than 55 conferences organized in more than 40 cities and 20 countries worldwide.
Associate Editors
Bassam R. Ali, Department of Genetics and Genomics, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates
Bassam R. Ali is professor of Genomic Medicine at the College of Medicine of The United Arab Emirates University. Prof. Ali received his PhD in Biochemistry from Cambridge University and worked for ten years at Imperial College London before joining United Arab Emirates University in 2006. Prof. Ali published over 180 original and reviews articles on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of human monogenic diseases, pharmacogenomics and precision medicine. Prof Ali has been awarded the 2018 Khalifa Education Award as the Distinguished University Professor in Scientific Research and the 2019 Abdul Hamid Shoman Award for Arab Scientists in Health Sciences. Prof Ali supervised many postgraduate and medical students and received numerous research grants. Prof. Ali is recognized internationally as he is the current Deputy-Editor-in-Chief for “Human Genomics”, and an associate editor of serval other scientific journals.
Erika Cecchin, PharmD, PhD, CRO Centro di Riferimento Oncologico di Aviano, Italy
Erika Cecchin is a clinical pharmacologist and director of the Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology Unit at the Oncology Reference Center (CRO) in Aviano, IRCCS, Italy. She is a member of the Academic Council of the Doctoral School of Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology at the University of Udine and of the Academic Council of the School of Specialization in Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Trieste. She teaches pharmacology at the Universities of Trieste and Padua. She holds positions on the executive committee and as a scientific advisor for working groups of various international associations in the field of pharmacogenomics and therapeutic drug monitoring, such as ESPT (European Society of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine); IATDMCT (International Association of TDM and Clinical Toxicology); IUPHAR (International Union of Pharmacology) and national organizations such as the Italian Society of Pharmacology (SIF). Her research aims to study the use of pharmacogenetics and therapeutic drug monitoring to improve the safety and appropriateness of cancer treatments. A specific focus of her research is to define the contribution of rare germline variants in drug-related genes, currently not adopted in clinical practice, in predicting chemotherapy-related toxicity in cancer patients.
Dr. Christina Mitropoulou, PhD, MBA, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates
Christina Mitropoulou, PhD, MBA obtained her economics degree from the University of Athens (Greece), her MBA from NIMBAS in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and her PhD on economic evaluation in Pharmacogenomics and Precision Medicine from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Christina is Managing Director and senior health economist at the Golden Helix Foundation (London, UK) and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Genetics and Genomics. Christina is leading the effort, as work package and Component Leader, to perform cost-effectiveness analysis and health technology assessment in two prospective pharmacogenomics clinical studies, the PREPARE study in Europe and the Em-HEART, a prospective pharmacogenomics clinical trial for cardiovascular disease patients in the United Arab Emirates. With a strong background in economics, she has been responsible for several projects with academic and governmental organizations pertaining to economic evaluation and health technology assessment in genomic medicine and pharmacogenomics, particularly in developing countries. She has also co-authored two textbooks on Economic Evaluation in Genomic Medicine, published by Elsevier/Academic Press in 2015 and 2023.
Daniel J. Mueller, MD, PhD, University of Toronto, Canada
Dr. Mueller research goals are to investigate the genomics of response and side effects to psychiatric medications, including polygenic risk scores and machine learning strategies. This line of research aims to significantly improve treatment of psychiatric conditions and to lessen the burden of medication side effects. In addition, he is actively involved in developing implementation models and developing pharmacogenetic guidelines for physicians and patients through his collaboration with international collaborators such as the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium.
Jesse Swen, PharmD, PhD, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands
Jesse Swen PharmD, PhD is an associate professor of pharmacogenetics and clinical pharmacist-clinical pharmacologist at the Department of Clinical Pharmacy & Toxicology, Leiden University Medical Center. He is the chair of the laboratory of the hospital pharmacy.
The long-term central goal of his career is to improve the outcomes of drug treatment by conducting first class biomedical research. To accomplish this goal he has built a research program that aims to improve drug treatment by discovery of novel pharmacogenetic biomarkers and subsequent translation to clinical practice, thereby providing a cornerstone for precision medicine. This work is seamlessly integrated with his work as chair of the pharmacy laboratory.
He has (co-)authored more than 100 (Web of Science indexed) articles in international peer reviewed scientific journals and several chapters in books. Dr. Swen is one of the primary investigators of the “Ubiquitous Pharmacogenomics” project (www.upgx.eu). U-PGx aims to implement pharmacogenetics across 7 European sites by genotyping 8,100 patients. In addition he is an active member of the Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group and the US Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium.
Recently he started a novel fundamental research line focusing on elucidating the frequently observed mismatch between the genotype and the capacity of an individual to metabolize drugs (phenotype). This phenomenon is called phenoconversion and presents a significant problem for the clinical implementation of pharmacogenetics. Underlying mechanisms involve both drug-drug interactions as well as disease state. In 2019 he was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics.
Prof Dr Ron HN van Schaik Dept. Clinical Chemistry Erasmus MC - University medical Center Rotterdam, The Netehrlands
Prof. Dr. Ron H.N. van Schaik, PhD, FACB - is a European Specialist Laboratory Medicine, a Full Professor in Pharmacogenetics and Head of the Department of Clinical Chemistry at the Erasmus University Medical Center MC Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This department includes the International (IFCC) Expert Center for Pharmacogenetics. Main interest of Prof. van Schaik is applying DNA analysis for guiding drug therapy, with a focus on pharmacogenetic translational research in the fields of oncology, pain, solid organ transplantation and psychiatry. The number of publications on this topic exceeds 400 peer reviewed articles (h-index 89 / Google scholar).
Prof van Schaik participates in several National and International advisory committees on Pharmacogenetics. He is founder, Past-President and current executive board member of the European Society for Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy (www.esptsociety.eu), chair of the European Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (Eu-PIC; chair (www.eu-pic.net), chair of the Dutch Clinical Pharmacogenetics Network (www.pgx-net.nl), chair of the Dutch Clinical Chemistry Molecular Diagnostics Committee (CMBD), former chair of the IFCC Task Force Pharmacogenetics, chair of the IFCC working group cfDNA, member of the of the Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group (DPWG), member of the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC), Member of PharmVar and founding member of the Pharmacogenomics Research Network (www.pgrn.org). In 2001, he received the Ortho Clinical Diagnostics Award for Outstanding Research, in 2009 the AACC Outstanding Speaker Award and in 2010 the AACC/Mol Pathology Award for Outstanding Scientific Research.