Benoît Déprez received a degree of pharmaceutical sciences from the school of pharmacy of Lille and a PhD in medicinal chemistry in the Lab of André Tartar at the Institut Pasteur de Lille (1997).With André Tartar, he created the High Throughput Chemistry laboratory of the Institut Pasteur that became in 1997 the chemistry department of Cerep. In 1999, after 3 years spent at Cerep as Head of Chemistry and Site Manager, he was hired by Devgen, a Belgian start-up in Gent (Flanders), where he set up Drug Discovery activities using C.elegans. From 1995 on, he managed several collaborations between biotech or academic labs and pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Merck KGa, Sanofi, Genentech). Benoît Deprez is currently Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy (U. Lille) and founder and director of Inserm Lab U761, now U1177 based at the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Faculty of pharmacy. His research interests primarily focus on early drug discovery : target validation, medicinal chemistry and pharmacokinetic. Areas explored by his team are infectious diseases, metabolic diseases, and cancer using a molecular approach and cutting edge screening technologies including high throughput cell imaging. Benoit is correspondent member of the Académie Nationale de Pharmacie. In 2013, he founded APTEEUS with Terence Beghyn, a company focused on personalized drug discovery for rare monogenic diseases. In 2016, APTEEUS was a recipient of Individualized Medecine Award at the Concours Mondial d’Innovation. In June 2018, he was appointed as Scientific Advisor to the Board of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, then, in March 2019, as Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur de Lille. Three candidate drugs discovered in his lab are currently licenced for clinical development to biotech and pharmaceutical companies.