Ghassan Matar

American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Professor Ghassan Matar is a Professor and Chairperson of the department of Experimental Pathology, Immunology and Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, American University of Beirut and Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Reference and research on Microbial Pathogens. His laboratory at AUB is mostly interested in understanding mobile genetic elements that confer antimicrobial resistance in infections relevant to the public health. This includes molecular mechanisms of resistance to antimicrobial agents in pathogenic bacteria, namely carbapenem and colistin resistance in Gram-negative bacteria, heavy metal-induced antimicrobial resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii from war zones, methicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus, and macrolide resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae. In addition, understanding the genetic basis of biofilm production and its therapeutic inhibition in Pseudomonas aeruginosa from patients with hospital-acquired infections. These studies highlighted the mechanisms of resistance and mode of transmission in the hospital settings and the community and conferred the baseline to recommend prophylactic and control measures to halt spread of antimicrobial resistance.

On the assessment of the treatment potential of combination therapy against multidrug resistant (MDR) bacterial agents, four major studies have been conducted. One on the treatment with antibacterial agents singly or in combination against highly virulent E. coli 0157-H7 and 0104-H4 infections in a mouse model, the second and third studies on the assessment of antimicrobial combination therapy and/or enzymatic inhibitors against infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacteria that harbor various antimicrobial resistance genes such as ndm and oxa-48, or colistin-resistant Gram-negative bacteria encoded by colistin resistance mcr genes. The fourth study was on the inhibitory effect of Echinocandins (Micafungin and Anidulafungin) along with antibacterial agents on the treatment of biofilm-forming Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These studies provided guidelines to adopt various therapeutic options based on using combination therapy and / or use of enzymatic inhibitors. A number of clinicians benefited from treatment approaches and guidelines my laboratory provided at the research level. Currently, his laboratory is in preparation to validate these assays that we developed in order to use them as routine diagnostic tests for the benefit of patients. These include the checkerboard for combination therapy options, multiplex PCR to detect resistance encoding genes to third generation cephalosporins, carbapenems and colistin and a genotyping assay for tracking the source of nosocomial infections in the medical center settings.