Didier Leroy
Past Core Course:
- Antimalarial Drugs and Drug Development
Dr Didier Leroy serves as director of Drug Discovery at Medicine for Malaria Venture (MMV), where he leads the biology, parasitology, and preclinical pharmacology in the context of individual projects, mini-portfolios of pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacology platforms. He trained as a molecular pharmacologist and biologist before joining the MMV Drug Discovery Team in 2009.
Before joining MMV, Dr Didier worked for seven years in pharmaceutical companies and for ten years in the academic field at a laboratory established and led at the Geneva University. He worked on multiple aspects of projects: target characterization, impact of nuclear organization on gene expression, proteomics, lead identification and optimization, molecular/cellular and in vivo pharmacology, druggability evaluation, and cellular biology/biochemistry. At Merck-Serono International, he managed a team of ten collaborators and several projects including Malaria in the Lead Discovery Department. He has broad experience in drug discovery and disease biology, including infectious diseases, cancer, inflammation, and neurological disorders. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Molecular Biology from the University J. Fourier of Grenoble in France and has more than 50 published scientific papers in various fields from enzymology and structural biology to parasitology.