Chair holder | David Rouquie

David Rouquie is leading the Toxicology Data Science team on the toxicology facility of Bayer Crop Science in Sophia Antipolis, France. His passion about science and research addressing societal needs kept him involved in innovative, collaborative and multidisciplinary research work. By training, he is biochemist and molecular biologist, continuously metamorphosing toward a hybrid profile at the interface between biological and computational sciences. He recently joined the scientific committee of ECETOC as Bayer representative.

The main focus of my research activity as affiliate chair at 3IA Côte d’Azur is on the emerging theme of chemical safety by design. This theme derives from all the on-going initiatives to improve the characterization of the risk of chemicals to humans by using more data from non-animal technologies and goes far beyond. Indeed, we are living a paradigm shift in the way bioactive small molecules are discovered but also de-risked. Instead of relying on numerous, long, costly cycles of trials and errors, thanks to the advance in systems biology and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms it is possible to proactively drive de novo chemical design with high probability to induce specific biological responses. For the first time, we have shown as proof of concept that a learning procedure can automatically design molecules that have a high probability to induce a desired transcriptomic profile in cell lines. In my position of affiliate chair at 3IA Côte d’Azur, this approach will be further developed by building the pillars necessary to guide chemical design toward optimized safety profiles while maintaining the desired biological effect of the compounds.