Adil Harroud

I am a neurologist and clinician-scientist with a focus on multiple sclerosis (MS) and neuroimmu-nology. The overarching goal of my research is to identify genetic determinants of MS risk and progression and translate those findings into improved patient care.

My early work leveraged genetic epidemiology approaches, such as Mendelian randomization, to determine whether a range of potential MS risk factors have a causal role in its pathogenesis. For instance, this research established a role for obesity in MS susceptibility and advanced our understanding of the mechanisms involved (through mediation analysis) and the time window for this effect. This body of work was recognized with an invitation to deliver a keynote Whitaker Lecture at the Consortium of MS Centers.

More recently, I led a genetic study of MS severity in over 22, 000 people with MS. For the first time, we established a genetic contribution to MS severity and identified a variant that accelerated the time to requiring a walking aid by up to 4 years. In contrast to MS risk variants that regulate immune genes, we showed that MS severity is driven by resilience and repair in the nervous system.

Ongoing efforts include expanding the genomic map of disease severity in MS, examining the sex-differential contributions of genetics and gene-environment interactions in MS, identifying genetically-informed disease biomarkers through polygenic scores and multi-omics integration, and integrating genetics into MS predictive models.