Prof. Benoît Déprez (EMBA 2013), Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur de Lille: “Knowledge is difficult to quantify, but it does have a value”

Benoît Déprez, who trained as a pharmacist, began his research career in the private sector while still completing his chemistry thesis. He was driven by his initial aspirations to work on human health and became a professor at the University of Lille, later joining the Institut Pasteur de Lille, where he went on to become Scientific Director. He is also joint founder of APTEEUS, a biotech start-up for which he regularly provides consultancy services. Since 2020 he has been working with teams at the Institut Pasteur to develop a treatment for Covid-19. We talked to him about the way research works in France and in Europe, as well as how his EDHEC Executive MBA training has served him in his career. 

How is scientific research structured in healthcare?

Research is expressed and conducted in the public sector, in the private sector and also through collaboration between the two. And so there is a continuum of research methods, from upstream (generally public) to downstream where you see applications and products that are made commercially available (mostly private). The world of start-ups and biotechnology plays a key role. There are also non-profit private research operators out there, such as foundations. For example, the Institut Pasteur de Lille is a private non-profit research foundation recognised as serving the public interest.

How would you summarise your current position and responsibilities?

My activities take place at the University but also at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, where I serve as Scientific Director. I am the head of a mixed research unit there, and I also teach at the Pharmacy Faculty of Lille. You can’t separate research from teaching. Indeed, that is an idea that has been promoted at EDHEC, where research addresses the School’s flagship themes. I am also co-founder and shareholder of a start-up called APTEEUS. It is possible to be a university professor and at the same time have a capital share in a firm that came about thanks to the success of the researcher’s work. This exceptional status has been an important lever in encouraging business-driven research based on cutting-edge academic research in public laboratories. 

You have an education in both chemistry and pharmacy. As Scientific Director, how do you ensure collaboration between all of the disciplines represented at the Institut Pasteur de Lille?

In disciplines relating to healthcare, therapeutic research in particular, much of the knowledge gravitates around biology. And biology itself is an expression of the complexity that chemistry can attain, because everything comes down to molecules, including thought. Just as physics is a foundation of chemistry, chemistry is a foundation of biology. What changes is the complexity of the objects being studied. The active ingredients found in our medication are relatively simple chemical molecules whose pharmacological activity stems from their multiple interactions with a highly complex environment. Physicists study biological objects, chemists design molecules, and biologists test them to find a “candidate” drug. This interdisciplinarity can even extend to cross-disciplinarity, which leads us to new concepts – like pharmacology – that don’t exist in any of the fundamental disciplines taken separately. It’s not just about making them work together, and that is what is so extremely stimulating. 

Do the projects at the Institut Pasteur de Lille emerge from a particular need or from the predicted evolution of illnesses?

In the value chain of a drug, the end clients are very special because they have three different “brains”: patient, doctor and paying customer. In France the paying customer is the Social Security system or perhaps private insurers, the doctor is the person who decides to use a healthcare product, and the patient is the one who actually uses it and benefits from its effects without necessarily paying for it. The Institut Pasteur de Lille looks at the need formulated by the medical community, and works as a pull force, exploring how to meet a doctor’s need. The medical need to treat Covid-19, for example, is one that came about abruptly. We felt it was possible to find an anti-viral and so we quickly set about working on it. This is a very rare case, because medical needs change gradually and in a way that can be anticipated, particularly in the case of illnesses like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease (linked to higher life expectancies), diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses (linked to lifestyle) or infectious diseases (particularly linked to the appearance of antibiotic-resistant bacteria).

Another facet of research works as a push force, based on what researchers observe. What motivates researchers is discovery, the goal of describing the world more precisely and understanding how a cell reacts to an environment. Some are more at ease describing and identifying a fortuitous application, while others prefer to know right away what they have to look for and what their ultimate objective is. 

Do you have a quota of projects to respect? Do projects have a deadline? 

When working as a push force – describing an organism or cell with ever-increasing accuracy – the horizon gradually recedes as you progress. And so there isn’t really any limit. It’s just that the research funding tends to impose a certain pace and schedule since research nowadays is essentially done through calls for tenders. The vast majority of our work is in “project mode”, with an objective, milestones and a schedule determined in respect of the allocated budget. A research institute is ultimately a mosaic of projects. Its activities are perfectly quantifiable on an international level, by discipline and by country, based on the number of articles published (and the quality of the journals), the number of citations, etc. As the Scientific Director of an institute, it has become necessary for me to promote research that produces honourable metrics. That allows us to satisfy stakeholders like the ministries that provide subsidies. But it is also important to enable research that is more exploratory and risky, which may lay the foundations for a major discovery.

So being a researcher nowadays is also about knowing how to sell yourself and promote projects, especially with the international competition you referred to?

Absolutely, it’s a profession that includes all of these aspects, which you often learn about in the job. A PhD is a gateway to the world of researchers, but we don’t really control for people’s organizational skills and personal branding, their capacity to optimally exploit an environment, work in a team, manage a project, or their decision-making capacity to know when a project needs to be killed off or, on the contrary, when to stick to their guns. It’s about managing individuals and teams because there is no such thing as a one-person project anymore, at least not in healthcare.

Was it to gain another vision of project management that you decided to join the Executive MBA programme at EDHEC?

Yes, the basic idea was to develop managerial reflexes and tools, but not necessarily with a view to directing an institution. As co-founder of APTEEUS, I was also in a position to have a more accurate picture of what business is about, whether it’s reading an income statement or structuring a need for financing. I particularly enjoyed the classes on strategy, about the best way to visualise a project. These are essential aspects that are not taught in science faculties. The EMBA is also a timeout from your professional activities, allowing you to open up your mind to other things.

What vision do you have of your professional environment since your time at EDHEC?

The University is a structure that creates knowledge. Knowledge is difficult to quantify, but it does have a value. I dream of being able to use financial and accounting tools to create an income statement and balance sheet whose component parts are adapted to the activity of generating knowledge, for today’s institutions can be compared to businesses. I have put in place such a dynamic at the Institut Pasteur de Lille so as to better manage research projects. It’s exactly like valorising innovation: it can be quantified from the very beginning of a research project, especially as a pull force. A project can have commercial value, updated to reflect the risk of not achieving the objective, as well as the remaining investment. Such an approach would enable managers to work more efficiently in research institutes.

Can APTEEUS be seen as a kind of showcase to generate even greater credibility for the innovation and project management at the Institut Pasteur de Lille?

The company’s existence proves that research can be valorised. APTEEUS focuses on medical needs relating to rare illnesses that find it very hard to secure funding. Investors can’t imagine making a profit when a drug is created for 50 people in Europe. The existing population is often not enough to produce correct statistics and run clinical trials. We can’t use the usual methods to prove that the drug will work. We need to turn to innovative business models akin to the social & solidarity economy. One viable way is to raise funds through patient groups to begin the search for a treatment if the illness can be tackled using our technologies.

There is a difference between the timescales at work in your research and having it accepted by the public authorities. How do you manage that disparity? 

For a technology that meets a stable need, we fully take account of that slow pace. In a normal situation, if we want to develop a new antibiotic to treat tuberculosis, there is a huge need but no absolute urgency, and we regularly interact with the funders and regulators. During the Covid pandemic, we ran up against a lot of scientific, political and regulatory interference. As for clinical trials, they are often geopolitical. It would be unthinkable to get approval for a new drug in the United States without first having conducted clinical trials on American soil. The American market is always the first targeted by research on healthcare technologies in Europe, because the prices on that market are much higher. 

What do European projects contribute to the progress being made in research?

I think Europe is a blessing for researchers. European sources of funding are more selective than national sources because they represent several million euros. The reward of European investment is harder to obtain, but much more significant, and the timeframe needed to secure the funding is about the same as on a national level. By funding collaborative research and projects, student and researcher exchanges, Europe also has an absolutely essential role in maintaining peace, which is part of the European construct. The most common funding method for European projects is the consortium, because the different partners and countries involved complement one another. There are also sources of funding that reward the scientific excellence of a programme managed by a person or team. This is done by allocating research grants.

You’re an associate of the Galerie Bacqueville in Lille and in the Netherlands. Do you also see art as a form of research and innovation? 

It’s a window into the world that is essential for me. Contemporary art and research have many similarities in the risks they take on. When a gallery owner tries to promote a young artist, it’s a gamble about the future. You improve an artist’s reputation by promoting them and by ensuring they remain motivated. This is not about creating knowledge but rather emotions, and that’s what teaches me a lot about my own profession as a researcher. It’s also a way to see the world differently and meet people with sensibilities that are more accessible than some researchers. 

Art bears witness to the changing world, just like research …

Artists are in any case always exploring and researching. They try to understand the world around them, understand themselves and react. Some artists’ vocation is to change the world, others simply strive to express their feelings, but they all leave a trace behind. Art can feed off science, physical and mathematical concepts. Researchers study the physical world, while artists use or look for new representations of the physical world that don’t rely on the same rationality, but the substrate is quite close.

Find out more:

Research at Prof. Benoît Déprez’s laboratory

Institut Pasteur de Lille

APTEEUS

Galerie Bacqueville