He is currently a hospital doctor and professor at the Collège de France, holder of the chair of cellular and molecular oncology (2014),[1] member of the French Academy of sciences since 2011.
Successful for the competitive examination as a resident at Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris in 1984, he chose the medical research internship programme, which he did in Pierre Tiollais' laboratory at the Pasteur Institute.
His thesis and post-doctoral work in this laboratory enabled him to make significant contributions to the understanding of retinoic acid signalling, in particular with the cloning of RARB and the identification of the first element of response to this hormone.
[3][4] Together with Laurent Degos and Anne Dejean, he then explored the basis of the clinical response of acute promyelocytic leukaemias to retinoic acid, which lead him to identify the reworking of the RARA gene in this disease[5][6] and describe the PML/RARA fusion.
His work, directly inspired by clinical observations and carried out in collaboration with French and Chinese teams, lead to new insights into the roles of differentiation, gene expression control or nuclear organization in the pathogenesis of this disease.