Speakers
Marc Fontecave, professor at the collège de France
Marc FONTECAVE
Professor at the College de France
Member of the French Academy of Sciences
- Date of birth: Sept. 27th 1956 in Carcassonne, France
- Married, 3 children
- Doctoral Thesis (1984)
- Director of the Laboratory of Chemistry and Biology of Metals, CEA Grenoble.(UMR 5249 CNRS, CEA, UJF)
- President of the Scientific Council of Paris
-1999-2001 : Scientific adviser of the Director of Research, Ministry of Research, Paris
-1995-1998 : Director of the Doctoral School “Chemistry-Biology” of the University of
Grenoble
-1992-1996 : Institut Universitaire de France (Junior)
-2004 : Silver Medal of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
-2005 : Institut Universitaire de France (Senior)
-2006 : Election at the French Academy of Sciences
-2008: Nominated as Professor at the College de France
Bernard Meunier, member of the French Academy of Sciences
Bernard Meunier has been an assistant-professor at the University of Montpellier from (1971-1972), a CNRS fellow (1973-2006), associate professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (1993-2006), President of the CNRS (2004-2006) and is now Chairman-CEO of PALUMED, a small company that he created in 2000.
Major research fields: medicinal chemistry, mechanism of action of anticancer drugs, enzymes and enzyme-models, biomimetic oxidations, P450 mechanisms, antimalarials and antibiotics.
B. M. is the co-author of more than 360 articles and 31 patents. He is member of the French Academy of Sciences since 1999. He is active at the Editorial Boards of several journals (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., ChemBioChem, New Journal of Chemistry, …).
"Chemistry and Life sciences"
by Jean-Marie Basset, Scientific Committe President
Chemistry and Life Sciences are extremely interconnected since biology deals with molecules or macromolecules or complex molecular systems.In a very simple and naive approach biology is nothing more that thestudy of chemical process that takes place in living systems.At the fundamental level such creative interconnection may be evaluated by the number of Nobel laureates of chemistry who have the double culture of chemists and biologists.The Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2009 awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steiz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed that the ribosomes looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. They have generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to
develop new antibiotics.
The Nobel prize in chemistry for 2008, rewards the initial discovery of the Green Fluorecent Protein (GFP) which have led to its use in a tagging tool in bioscience. Rasearchers can follow the the fate of various cells with the help of this GFP such as cell damage in the Alzheimer's disease. In the pharma industry, "Drug discovery" is a result of this creative overlap between chemistry and life sciences and more and more discovery of new medicaments will be based on such overlap. Explosion of molecular biology and genetics strongly modifies the strategy of pharma companies.
In the chemical industry enzymes or artificial enzymes discovered or synthetized by biologists are also becoming used as extremly usefull
tools to synthetize simple molecules and new processes have been recently developped (lactic acide,succinicacide).
Since the early 90's, chemists and now biologists are now becoming confortable with the arrival of new analytical tools that are now used as routine methods, not only in drug discovery such as NMR,Mass spectrometry, Imaging and X-ray structures for large molecules.
Creative chemists and biologists will be the key players of pharmaceutical industry. The development of these tools to identify not
only the structure but also the dynamic behaviour and the chemical interaction between small molecules and proteins is of extreme
importance.