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 director of the Inserm Unit UMR-S 545 and chairman of the Department of Atherosclerosis, with laboratories on the campus of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, and the Research Pole of the University of Lille 2, Lille, France.

Pr. Staels earned his doctorate at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium. He completed postdoctoral work 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 member of learned societies such as the European Atherosclerosis Society, the International Atherosclerosis Societies (Distinguished Fellow), the ALFEDIAM, the American Heart Association (Premium Professional Silver Heart Member), the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), and the American Diabetes Association. He is the president of the Nouvelle Société Française d’Athérosclérose (NSFA).
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 received the pharmaceutical “Barré” price 2007 from the Faculté de Pharmacie of Montreal.

Pr. Staels’ research focuses on molecular pharmacology of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, including dyslipidemia and type 2 diabetes. He particularly studies the role of nuclear receptors (such as the PPARs, FXR, Rev-erba and RORa) in the control of inflammation and lipid and glucose homeostasis as well as the transcriptional mechanisms involved. Pr. Staels was among the first to identify a crucial role for the nuclear receptor PPARa 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 developed 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 280 original papers. He has also authored more than 140 review articles and contributed to several book chapters.
He received the ISI citations award (citation number of 22273; h-index factor of 79 and average citation of 44/article). Based on the French 2007 Necker Institute dossier, Pr.Staels is among the 35 french researchers with the highest publication volume (2000-2005). Pr. Staels is also reviewer for numerous international journals and has been invited speaker at many prestigious international meetings, including, in 2006, the IAS, AHA, ADA and IDF. He contributed to the organization of congresses such as the “International Symposia on PPARs”, the NSFA annual congress and was chairman of a 2007 Keystone Symposium (“Metabolic Syndrome”).