Pierre Gressens

Pierre Gressens is a man preoccupied with time, and not only because he spends so much of it on the Eurostar zooming between his Paris base at the Diderot University and Robert-Debré Hospital and his office in the Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK. As a leader in developmental neuroscience who, according to Washington University's Terrie Inder has made “unparalleled contributions to our understanding of the pathogenesis of injury to the immature brain”, time is an absolutely crucial factor for Gressens “because the developing brain is really moving all the time”, he explains.

When The Lancet Neurology had the opportunity to spend some time talking to Gressens early in May, he had just stepped off a plane in Boston, MA, USA, on his way to visit some old friends from his postdoc days at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. But despite the jet lag he was razor sharp and, although as humble and softly spoken as Inder had described him, delighted in filling us in on the revolution that has taken place in perinatal neurology since he first joined the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology and his mentor Phillipe Evrard at the University of Louvain Medical School in Brussels, in his native Belgium in 1989.

Now the Director of the only Inserm unit that specialises in perinatal neurological disorders, Gressens had originally wanted to be a neurosurgeon before Evrard, who retired last year, persuaded him not only to specialise in child neurology, but also of the importance of having a hand in research. “He was a clinical person, but realised that the combination of research and clinical work was the right one”, says Gressens, who is now similarly evangelical about the benefits of being a clinician–scientist. His own research has given him a “different perspective” about what he reads, he says; “when you've done research yourself you can read between the lines in a different way”. But perhaps most importantly, he explains, “once you work with the developing brain in experimental models, you can really live within the brain and form a virtual picture, so when you see a patient you have a different view and can try to understand what the mechanism is that's gone wrong”.

Getting to grips with complex mechanisms is Gressens' forte—for 30 years now he has been at the forefront of incredible progress in our understanding of the developing brain. His first major contribution came in the early 1990s during his short but transformative time at the NIH—“a series of pioneering studies with Doug Brenneman on the functions of vasoactive intestinal peptide in development”, explains Olaf Dammann, from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, who has collaborated with Gressens for almost 15 years. The NIH was a wonderful place to do research says Gressens: “so many resources, so many techniques. You want to do something and there's always someone who can do it. It was just amazing, I moved from a tiny lab in Brussels and moved to a world of research”. In the mid 1990s Gressens followed Evrard to Paris, where Dammann says he made his second major contribution—“the creation (with Stephane Marret) and continuing development and application of an extremely successful rodent model of ibotenate-induced excitotoxic brain damage”. Both have played their part in the move during the past 20 or 30 years from a cellular level of understanding of the developing brain to one in which Gressens says “we now have to consider millions of molecules”.

This increasing depth of understanding has also brought about a radical change in people's attitude towards brain injury in perinates. “When I first started and was talking about protecting the brain of the baby, most clinicians would say ‘oh it's impossible, when the brain is damaged there is no hope', but now people feel there is something we can do”, Gressens explains. And again, it is Gressens who is leading the pack. “He pioneers the idea of inflammation and its effects when sustained in the developing brain”, says Dammann, “and his results offer hope for the possibility to develop perinatal neuroprotective interventions in a field that has not seen pharmacologic progress for decades”.

After more than a decade of work with animal models, Gressens' work on the neuroprotective properties of melatonin in perinates has now been translated to clinical trials, a development that Gressens describes as a “very exciting thing for me; maybe we'll have contributed at some level to the improvement of the health of babies”, he says with real enthusiasm. “He likes doing research because he likes it, not because it might bring him fame and glory”, says Dammann of Gressens, although, he adds “in his case, it does”. So it should, says Inder, who calls Gressens “exceptional”, and is delighted that “he is getting the recognition that he so deserves”. And there is much more to come, according to Dammann. “What's most exciting is that Pierre does not just continue walking traditional pathways, but paves new avenues by thinking ahead. Although he always proceeds in a gentle way, Pierre does not shy away from being iconoclastic”, he says. “I am certain that his work will have a major impact for many years to come”.

Companies

• Professor of Perinatal Neurology Imperial College London (2009)
• Lab chief Inserm (2005)