Bruno Villoutreix is research director at INSERM (presently: INSERM U1141, Hospital Robert Debré, University Paris Cité, France) (March 2023).
He has been working at the interface between molecular medicine, structural bioinformatics and chemoinformatics/AI for over 25 years in different countries, both in the private and academic sectors. He contributed strongly to the development of several chemical probes with one molecule designed in silico presently in phase II. He also worked on the rational stabilization of therapeutic proteins and on small molecule drug repurposing. With several collaborators, he developed 5 software packages and databases, several of them are used worldwide. He has over 230 publications (over 11530 citations, H-index 60 - Google Scholar), 14 patents, 12 book chapters. He is the co-founder of 2 startups (Sweden and USA). He is also Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Drug Discovery (since 2021).

BV was the head of the Inserm research unit U973 (2009-2018) which was located on the University Paris Diderot campus and he has also been co-director of the doctoral school MTCI from 2012-2015.

 

Some more info

Examples of contributions combining in silico and experimental approaches in the field of cancer and coagulation-complement at the beginning of my career and how these relate to my present research projects ?

• Around 1993: analysis of protein-protein interfaces in blood coagulation and the complement system and the inhibition of these interactions with antibodies and peptides (USA)
• Around 1993: the use of structural bioinformatics to study therapeutic targets, like the prostate specific antigen (PSA, first structural model) and the use of protein-protein docking to help the design of antibodies to measure PSA free and PSA in complex with serpin molecules (USA, Sweden, Finland). Then, many other proteins important for human health were investigated, like proteins involved in the anticoagulant protein C pathway. Modulation of protein-protein interactions with peptides
• Around 1994: the use of structural analysis to investigate point mutations identified in patients, essentially for thrombosis and bleeding disorders (USA)
• Around 1995: modulation of proteins with heparin
• Around 1995: the use of ligand docking tools to investigate mAbs-small molecule interactions while working in the private sector (Biotech in Finland)
• Around 1998: the first structural model of a discoidin domain (Sweden)
• Around 2003: stabilization of proteins via site directed mutagenesis designed after computational analysis, area of hemophilia, for a big pharma in the USA
• Around 2003: virtual screening and more specifically hierarchical virtual screening (France), applications in cancer, coagulation,...
• Around 2005-2006: computer design of low molecular weight compounds that mimic a protein-protein interaction and the design of a molecule that is now in clinical trial phase 1b (Sweden)
• Around 2006: tools to compute some ADMET properties (France)
• Around 2006: modulation of protein-membrane interactions (France)