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Professor Georges Bahr
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Georges Bahr is currently Professor of Immunology and Virology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Balamand in Lebanon. He received a Bachelor and a Master of Sciences from the American University of Beirut, a PhD from the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London University, and a Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists in London

Dr. Bahr started his scientific career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris developing the concept of immunotherapy in the management of chronic infections and tumors. His experimental findings were successfully translated, in 1986, into clinical testing for the immunotherapy of tuberculosis in Kuwait where he served as consultant to the Ministry of Public Health and as Associate Professor at the Medical School in Kuwait University. In the early nineties, Dr. Bahr joined Sandoz Research Institute in Vienna as Head of Program, and his research was focused on the immunotherapy of chronic viral infections including HIV and Hepatitis C. After becoming the Head of the HIV Department at the Pasteur Institute in Lille in 1996, Dr. Bahr’s research targeted the identification of synthetic immunomodulators capable of blocking viral replication. This work has led to a series of patents and to the ongoing clinical evaluation of a new generation of immunotherapeutics. Recently, Dr Bahr has directed his research efforts towards the molecular analysis of the mechanism of action of synthetic immunomodulators and to the identification of novel cellular genes mediating innate immunity. His research activities were heavily funded by European academic and governmental institutions, as well as by pharmaceutical industries, and had lead to over 100 original publications and several book chapters.

Dr. Bahr has been a member of the international review panel of several scientific and medical journals, a keynote speaker at prestigious conferences, organizer of international symposia, and inventor or co-inventor of 19 patents. His scientific achievement was awarded the Euroscience Rammal prize in 2004. He served as external consultant to the strategic committee of international affairs at the French Academy of Sciences, as member of the scientific board of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and as member of the review and funding committee of the framework program 6 in life sciences at the European commission in Brussels. In the last couple of years, he served first as Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and is now the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Balamand.

Sample of Academician's Research

Murabutide is a safe synthetic immunomodulator derived from
muramyl dipeptide (MDP), the smallest bioactive unit of bacterial
peptidoglycan.

Professor Bahr and his co-workers have shown that Murabutide can activate multiple effector pathways in macrophages and in dendritic cells, rendering them nonpermissive for HIV-1 replication. This work has paved the way towards a new generation of immunotherapeutics.
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