LAU’s Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine has launched the first Lebanese Registry of Atopic Dermatitis (LebRAD) project in partnership with the Global Atopic Dermatitis Atlas (GADA), a prominent global initiative of the International League of Dermatological Societies (ILDS) led by Professor Carsten Flohr, St John’s Institute of Dermatology, King’s College London, UK.

LebRad will be headed by the school’s Clinical Assistant Professor in the Dermatology Department Jinane El Khoury Okais. The project is an inter-university collaboration supported by the Lebanese Dermatology Society involving several Lebanese institutions with dermatology programs.

As GADA seeks to establish and maintain an atlas of data on atopic dermatitis from all countries, especially those lacking such information, LebRAD will collect and link patients’ data in Lebanon for insight into the disease burden and epidemiology in the country. The GADA atlas will ultimately serve as a central repository for a consolidated database of atopic dermatitis to enhance an understanding of its global and local burden as well as its variations around the world. Such data will ideally be collected and analyzed using similar methods across countries.

Through LebRAD, Lebanon and LAU will pioneer the piloting of the standardized data entry platform that GADA built, and refined for LebRAD, with the technical software support of Swiss4ward. The plan is for LebRAD to contribute to the global evidence ecosystem from a country lacking epidemiological data on atopic dermatitis, and for GADA to make the platform available to others who want to create a registry for patients with atopic dermatitis.

The partnership with GADA was established after the school’s alumna, Dr. Rita Iskandar (MD ’20), was awarded the Academy of Medical Sciences’ Daniel Turnberg Travel Fellowship which fosters research ties between the Middle East and the UK. During her fellowship, Dr. Iskandar facilitated collaboration between LAU, supervised by Dr. El Khoury Okais, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, supervised by Professor Sinéad Langan, who connected the LebRAD team with the GADA team.

“This milestone aligns with LAU’s commitment to fostering impactful collaborations and advancing dermatology care for the Lebanese population,” said Dr. El Khoury Okais. “As an institution that is both home to skilled researchers and a nurturing ground for future leaders in medicine, LAU proudly contributes to this global effort.”