Fabien Vincent, PhD, is an Associate Research Fellow in the Hit Discovery and Lead Profiling Group at Pfizer. His laboratory provides molecular pharmacology support for the small molecule project portfolios of the Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit and the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation. This work includes developing assays for high throughput screening as well as additional assays to elucidate the structure-activity relationship of active compounds, understand mechanism of action and demonstrate translation into pre-clinical models. His main research interests are centered on improving the translation of discovery research to subjects and specifically include phenotypic screening and atypical molecular mechanisms of action.

Dr. Vincent received a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in organic chemistry from CPE Lyon (France) before conducting graduate research in the fields of chemical biology and enzymology in the laboratory of Professor Harold Kohn at the University of Houston. He later became a postdoctoral fellow in chemical biology at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego. He entered the field of drug discovery as both a drug discovery research project leader and molecular pharmacology-biochemistry group leader. He has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed articles and has been invited to present his research at more than 15 conferences.

Dr. Vincent is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chemical Probes initiative and has been a National Institute of Health study section reviewer on High Throughput Screening and molecular probe identification. He was recently a guest editor on a special issue in MedChemComm, surveying progress and advances in the field of phenotypic drug discovery. Dr. Vincent has become a leading voice in the Phenotypic Renaissance currently taking place in the pharmaceutical industry. This drug discovery strategy aims to reverse the disease phenotype (i.e. the set of observable characteristics of the disease) rather than focusing on specific hypothesized protein targets. In other words, the goal is to focus on what works rather than what we think could work. Dr. Vincent recently led a team of Pfizer scientists in an analysis of how best to approach phenotypic screening, and specifically how to design the optimal phenotypic assays, those which can best predict compounds and mechanisms that will be effective in subjects (Science Translational Medicine., 2015, 7, 293ps15).