Jean Baptiste-Rascle, PhD

Expert Bio

Jean-Baptiste Rascle has 12 years of experience in safety assessment of pesticides and biotech crops at Bayer. In his current role as regulatory toxicologist, he is tasked with delivering data and safety studies to the appropriate regulatory authorities for GMO products registration.

In 2004, Jean-Baptiste joined Bayer as a Study Director in toxicology, where he was in charge of conducting safety assessment studies for pesticides and GMOs. Since 2010, Jean-Baptiste has been in Bayer’s regulatory toxicology group, where he is in charge of designing, monitoring, and developing innovative testing strategies to demonstrate the safety of proteins, seeds, and agricultural products from GMOs.

Jean-Baptiste began his career in academia then worked for three years in the pharmaceutical industry at the Neuroscience Research Center of Merck Sharp & Dohme in the UK. His activities focused on researching human genes and proteins that could be used as novel pharmaceutical targets, with a particular interest in neurological disorders.

Jean-Baptiste holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the Ecole Normale Supérieur (ENS) of Lyon, France. His research focused on the mechanisms responsible for the high genetic variability of retroviruses, such as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1). After he obtained his Ph.D. in 1999, he moved to the University College London (UK) as an EMBO post-doctoral fellow, in the laboratory of Pr. Robin A. Weiss. He made some of the earliest studies on gene expression using DNA microarrays, looking at cancer cell development.