member

Biography

Philippe Ravassard trained as a student in Biochemistry at the “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan”. He obtained his PhD in Jacques Mallet’s laboratory as a developmental neurobiologist. He joined McGill University in Montreal for post-doctoral studies (JP Julien’s lab, 1997-98). He obtained the “Habilitation à diriger la recherche“ (HDR) in 2014. He was first to clone in rat the transcription factor Neurogenin3 (ngn3). This factor was next identified as the key regulator of endocrine differentiation in the pancreas. His work on ngn3 led him to study developmental differentiation in both central nervous system and endocrine pancreas. During the past 15 years he significantly contributed in the field of pancreas development, yielding to the engineering of the first and only human pancreatic beta cell line that secretes insulin in response to glucose in a physiological manner. Such line has become today the gold standard for human pancreatic beta cell studies, both in academia and in the industry. Recently, he has described the tissue specific repertoire of long non-coding RNA in human beta cells and obtained a NIH grant to study the epigenetic function of these newly identified lncRNAs. With the integration of PR’s group in the ICM, the team took advantage of the knowhow and expertise gained in the field of pancreas and Diabetes to address molecular aspect linked to non-coding elements in Parkinson disease.