Dr. Chaker N. Adra
President
Chair, Board of Directors

Chaker Adra earned his doctorate at The University of Ottawa, in collaboration with the University of California in San Francisco and the University of Washington in Seattle. He worked as a Fellow and Faculty at Harvard Medical School, The Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, The Brigham and Women’s Hospital and The Children’s Hospital Boston. He is a geneticist, biochemist, molecular and cellular biologist investigating the biology of hematopoiesis, cancer, and pioneering the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Chaker Adra founded, established and directed The Stem Cell Therapy Program/Stem Cell and Tissue Re-engineering Program at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSH&RC), RC, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and also was The Acting Chairman of The Biomedical Research Department at KFSH&RC. He is the Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer of Biofunctional Structural Research Institute (BFSRI), Fukuoka, Japan.
Chaker Adra has offered all his discoveries, technologies and inventions free to the public and the whole world. His breakthroughs have significant economic value and many tools, antibodies and reagents derived from his work are currently in commercial use . They are advancing research, improving healthcare, providing jobs and supporting business growth making the world better.
Dr. Adra is the inventor of 19 USA and International Patents and Patent Applications.
His scientific accomplishments include:
・He cloned and characterized the family of the phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK) genes and pseudogenes.
・ He identified the PGK-1 promoter which has proven to be a powerful and widely used promoter for expression of exogenously introduced genes into heterologous cells. He designed and constructed The PGK1-Neo Cassette/Shuttle which is being used around the world for gene therapy, to engineer, from embryonic stem cells, transgenic and knockout animals to understand the causes and mechanisms of all human diseases and find cures for genetic, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, lung, renal, liver, infectious and autoimmune diseases, diabetes and cancer.
・He cloned the pgk-2 gene, a transcribed retroposon, showing for the first time that gene duplication, by retroposition more than 100 million years ago, has been used as a mechanism for evolutionary diversification.
・He inferred that  mammalian genomes are fluid like the prokaryotic genomes, with the potential to create additional new species.
・Most recently, he identified chromosomal regions that contain asthma and atopy susceptibility genes and characterized functional variants in these genes. He described functional polymorphisms in interleukin-4, interleukin-13 and their receptors in allergic diseases, thus making these molecules, with STAT 6, emerging targets for therapeutic treatment of allergic patients and for the development of preventive strategies. He discovered several new cancer and stem cell specific biomarkers.
・In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Chaker Adra discovered several universal gene families and biochemical and/or physiological pathways operating in bacteria, yeast, plants, animals and humans:
– PGK Gene Family,
– D4GDI/RhoGDI2/ARHGDIB,
– RhoGDI3/ARHGDIG,
– RTEF-1,
– HTm4/CD20L/MS4A Gene Family,
– LAPTM5, and
– SMARCAD1 Helicase Gene Family,
and
– SMARCAD1, The Fingerprints Gene, SMARCAD Syndromes and Ectodermal Dysplasia Gene.
NCBI Bibliography