• Dr. Patrinos George

CV

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. 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 360 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, Nature Mental Health, Nature Neuroscience, 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.

ABSTRACT

Genome-guided therapeutics in psychiatry: results from the PREPARE study and beyond

George P. Patrinos 1,2,3,4

I Director General and Director of Research, Hellenic Pasteur Institute, Athens, Greece; 2 Professor; University of Patras School of Health Sciences, Department of Pharmacy, Patras, Greece; 3 Adjunct Full Professor; United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Genetics and Genomics, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates; 4 Adjunct Faculty; Erasmus MC, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Pathology, Clinical Bioinformatics Unit, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

 

In the post-genomic era, the rapid evolution of high-throughput genotyping technologies and the increased pace of production of genetic research data, are continually prompting the development of appropriate informatics tools, systems and databases as we attempt to cope with the flood of incoming genetic information. Alongside new technologies that serve to enhance data connectivity, emerging information systems should contribute to the creation of a powerful knowledge environment for genotype-to-phenotype information in the context of translational medicine. In the area of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, it has become evident that database applications providing important information on the occurrence and consequences of gene variants involved in pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, drug efficacy and drug toxicity, will become an integral tool for researchers and medical practitioners alike. At the same time, two fundamental issues are inextricably linked to current developments, namely data sharing and data protection. In this lecture, the impact of high throughput and next generation sequencing technology and its impact on pharmacogenomics research and clinical implementation of genomic medicine will be addressed. In addition, advances and challenges in the field of pharmacogenomics information systems will be discussed, which in turn prompted the development of an integrated electronic ‘pharmacogenomics assistant’. The system is designed to provide personalized drug recommendations based on linked genotype-to-phenotype pharmacogenomics data, as well as to support biomedical researchers in the identification of pharmacogenomic related gene variants.