Vincent Mooser
Professor, Department of Human Genetics
Since August 1st, 2019, Vincent Mooser MD is the holder of the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Genomic Medicine at McGill University in Montreal. His Chair is entitled : “From Genes to Next Generation Therapies”.
Vincent Mooser combines a unique blend of broad academic and industry experience covering
internal medicine, laboratory medicine, pharmaceutical sciences and genomic / precision medicine. He is board certified in internal medicine. After an extensive training in clinical pharmacology (Lausanne), experimental pharmacology (University of Melbourne) and molecular genetics of lipid disorders (UT Southwestern, Dallas TX), he was granted a six-year research professorship award from the Swiss National Science Foundation to study the effect of environmental and genetic contributors to lipid disorders and coronary artery disease.
In 2002, Vincent Mooser joined GSK R&D in Philadelphia to lead the effort in genetics of cardiovascular diseases. In this position, he co-designed and co-run with Prof Gérard Waeber the CoLaus (Cohorte Lausannoise) population-based cohort. He subsequently run roles of increasing responsibility (vice-president in charge of applied genetics and head of genetics for rare diseases) in GSK before returning to academia in Lausanne in 2011.
In CHUV Lausanne, he chaired for 6 years the Laboratory Department, which is the umbrella organization for the diagnostic labs in this University Hospital, with 600 collaborators. He was also elected for 3 years Vice-Dean for Clinical Research at Lausanne University Faculty of Biology and Medicine. In these capacities, he designed, obtained funding and implemented the foundation for genomic medicine at CHUV/UNIL, with the creation of the Lausanne Institutional Biobank. He subsequently focused his activities on clinical chemistry and biomarker development as a complement to genomic medicine.
Before joining McGill, Vincent Mooser was a Board member of the Swiss Academy for Medical Sciences, a member of the Analysis Group at the Federal Office of Public Health, a member of the Executive Committee of the Swiss Personalized Network, and the chairman of the Board for the Swiss Biobanking Platform. Vincent Mooser has recently been named as Adjunct Professor at the University of Bern. He contributed to 200+ peer-reviewed publications.
Vincent Mooser has been passionate about the use of genetics and genomics to support drug discovery and development for the past 25 years. The CERC he presently chairs has as a mission to use cutting-edge genomics and genetics to support the discovery and development of novel therapeutics. More specifically, he plans to focus on identification and validation of new targets, and on performing, in collaboration with clinical trial centers in the McGill-affiliated hospitals, a new generation of proof-of-concept trials enrolling primarily highly genetically selected participants. The approach he develops is disease and therapy-area agnostic. It takes advantage of the informativeness of naturally occurring functional variants in the human genome and capitalizes on the strengths of the McGill ecosystem, new IT, sequencing and AI as well as functional genomics technologies and highly informative clinical trials.
