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Dr. Fadia K. El-Bitar

Associate Scientist, Department of Genetics
King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center
Riyadh - KSA
 

Dr. El Bitar established Alzheimer’s project at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. The objectives of this project were focused in three parameters: 1) looking for genetic cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in Saudi patients, 2) Finding AD modeling derived from Saudi patients by converting fibroblasts to neurons which will permit to have brain cells related to AD in a dish, 3) Discovery of drug(s) that can reduce the toxic effect of amyloid peptides causing AD and studying its effect on neuronal cells derived from Alzheimer’s patient. This kind of research permits the orientation towards the precision medicine giving the opportunity for each patient of getting the convenient treatment.

This project is the outcome of a distinguished team work represented by scientists, physicians, technical and administrative staff that produced national and international collaborations. An important fund represented by two millions of Saudi riyal was offered by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. In addition, Alzheimer’s research got benefit from the advanced technology offered by research team belonging to Saudi Human Genome Project who is participating in discovery of novel genetic factor(s) of AD. Many scientific papers were published in national and international conferences and more than one peer reviewed articles are in process of submission. This is beside to the training of science and medical students on the technologies developed in this project and supervision of one master student.

Dr. Fadia El Bitar got her PhD in 1999 in Cellular and Molecular Biology from INSERM (National Institute for Science and Health), Faculty of Medicine, University of Auvergne -France. She got her Master in 1995 in Cellular and Molecular Biology from University of Blaise-Pascal-France and Bachelor of Science in 1994 in cellular and molecular Physiology from the same university. She has another Bachelor of Science obtained in 1991 in Biochemistry from Lebanese American University, Lebanon.