Full Professor, Faculty of Pharmacie
University of Lille II
Lille, France

BIOGRAPHY

Bart Staels, PhD., is professor in the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Lille 2, Lille, France. He is also research group leader in the Department of Atherosclerosis at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, Inserm UR545, France.

Pr. Staels earned his doctorate at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium. He completed postdoctoral training at the Metabolic Research Unit, University of California, San Francisco and was postdoctoral research fellow of the Reverse Cholesterol Transport/Atherosclerosis Project, BioAvenir, Vitry sur Seine, France.

Pr. Staels is a member of learned societies such as the European and International Atherosclerosis Societies, the Nouvelle Société Française d’Athérosclérose, the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association.

The recipient of numerous grants, awards, and scientific prizes, Pr Staels has been awarded the Young Investigator Award of the European Atherosclerosis Society, the Bronze Medal of the CNRS and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Atherosclerosis Society.

Pr. Staels’ research has focused on molecular pharmacology of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. He studied particularly the role of nuclear receptors (such as the PPARs, FXR, Rev-erb and RORs) in the control of inflammation and lipid and glucose homeostasis as well as the transcriptional mechanisms involved. Pr. Staels was the first to identify a crucial role for the nuclear receptor PPARalpha in the control of lipid and glucose metabolism as well as cardiovascular function in humans. He elucidated the action mechanism of the fibrate class of drugs that are currently used in the treatment of lipid disorders and worked also on the action mechanism of the glitazones, a very recently developped class of anti-diabetic drugs. His work has identified the PPAR transcription factors as potential drug targets for the treatment of diabetes, dyslipidemia and cardiovascular disease, which contributed to the development of several novel therapeutic compounds currently in different stages of clinical development.

To date, Pr. Staels has published more than 180 original papers and more than 100 abstracts. He has also authored 80 review articles and contributed several book chapters. Pr. Staels is also reviewer for numerous international journals and has been invited speaker at many prestigious international meetings.