Raphaël Rousseau, Group Medical Director, is the global franchise head of the innovative pediatric drug development (iPODD) group at Genentech, a member of the Roche Group.
iPODD oversees Roche’s pediatric strategy and ensures optimized implementation of pediatric clinical development plans across the company’s oncology portfolio.
Prior to joining Roche in 2009, Raphaël Rousseau held the position of professor of Medical and Pediatric Oncology at the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. In this function he established a clinical and translational research program in high-risk pediatric cancers at Lyon’s Institute for Pediatric Hemato-Oncology and became a permanent expert for biomedical research within France’s Agency for the Safety of Medicinal Products (AFSSAPS, now ANSM).
From 1998 to 2005, he was a research & clinical fellow at Texas Children’s Cancer Center and the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA. In 2005, he became an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine.
A recipient of EU’s Marie Curie Reintegration grant in 2005, he was also the coordinator from 2005 to 2009 of the CHILDHOPE European consortium (FP6 STREP programme) dedicated to the immune treatment of childhood acute leukemias using gene-modified T cells.
Raphaël Rousseau is the lead author of several seminal publications in childhood neuroblastomas and leukemias. He was awarded the 2008 Cancer Foundation Advanced Clinical Research Award in Sarcoma from the American Society of Clinical Oncology for his translational research project in pediatric osteosarcoma, a bone tumour, using nanoparticles targeting tumour blood vessels.
A pediatric onco-hematologist by training, Raphaël Rousseau holds an MD from the University René Descartes and a PhD in therapeutic biotechnologies from the University Denis Diderot, both in Paris, France.