Bart Deplancke wins Cloëtta Prize

The Professor Dr Max Cloëtta Foundation was set up in Zürich in 1973 by Dr Antoine Cloëtta to honour his father, Professor Max Cloëtta, a Swiss pharmacologist. The purpose of the Foundation is “to support and promote medical research and related disciplines in the natural sciences in Switzerland” and “to create and to award once a year a Cloëtta Prize to honour personalities in Switzerland and abroad, who have distinguished themselves in a particular way in certain fields of medical research”.

This year, the Cloëtta Foundation has awarded its Prize to two prestigious scientists, Professor Anne Müller at the University of Zurich (Institute of Molecular Cancer Research) and Professor Bart Deplancke at EPFL (School of Life Sciences).

Professor Deplancke directs the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics within the Institute of Bioengineering. His lab is widely recognized for the development of novel microfluidic, high-throughput sequencing, single-cell omics, and computational approaches, which are used to address biological questions pertaining to the biology of the genome.

For example, using these novel approaches, Deplancke’s group has demonstrated that the human genome is highly modular, in that many regulatory processes such as transcription factor binding and chromatin mark dynamics are highly coordinated over genomic regions that span 100 kb (Kiplinen et al., Science, 2013; Waszak et al, Cell, 2015; Deplancke et al., Cell, 2016).

The discovery of these modules (termed “variable chromatin modules”) promises to significantly enhance our understanding of how regulatory variation shapes molecular, cellular and even organismal phenotypic diversity.

In addition, by pioneering single-cell gene expression profiling of stromal cells from fat tissue, Deplancke’s group uncovered several distinct stromal subpopulations with one of these being able to suppress fat cell formation by the other subpopulations (Schwalie et al., Nature, 2018). This discovery introduced a more general concept, namely the realization that distinct stromal cell populations exist in fat tissue that may either promote or suppress fat cell formation, which is linked to metabolic control and type 2 diabetes. Moreover, similar mechanisms may exist in other tissues where fat cell formation needs to be tightly controlled such as the bone marrow and muscle.

“I am obviously delighted to receive the prestigious Cloëtta prize,” says Deplancke. “Not only for all my group members who contributed their amazing energy and creativity to our research – so this also really their award – but also because we see it as a very nice recognition of the value of interdisciplinary research, which is more difficult to evaluate and is therefore often overlooked.”

Each winner of the Cloëtta Prize also received a sum of 50,000 Swiss francs. The Prize was awarded during a ceremony on 26 November 2021 at the University of Zurich.