As Romain Lopez (he/him) sees it, he’s just a first-generation college graduate and math enthusiast who stumbled into the drug industry. Even his family isn’t so sure how he found his way to Stanford University and then to drug company Genentech.
“Sometimes they kind of smile and [ask] me, ‘Where do you come from?’” he said.
Lopez taught himself computer programming languages as a preteen and became the first person in his family to graduate from high school. He studied math at École Polytechnique in France and got his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, then started a joint postdoctoral research assignment at Stanford Medical School and Genentech, where he has worked with an executive to develop generative computer models.
He is particularly interested in efforts to chart out which genes and genetic variation contribute to diseases. In the two decades since the human genome was sequenced, researchers have pinpointed variations in large population studies that either hint at or determine genetic causes of some diseases. Genetic editing technology like CRISPR has helped scientists examine how specific genetic changes affect cell activity. Together, that data can create more dynamic explanations of how genes influence health and disease.
These models could theoretically help explain the intricate and sometimes hidden drivers of diseases. But one of the problems that Lopez sees is that researchers don’t often have every single piece of genetic or cellular data they need to create these maps. That’s why Lopez is interested in efforts to use computer modeling to predict what’s missing and fill in the blanks.
Over the last year, Lopez and his collaborators have written about new models that could help streamline genetic research and make it more efficient. One of those models, IterPert, was designed to help scientists decide which combinations of genes to study next. “This is crucial because in certain applications the number of possible gene combinations to test is enormous, far exceeding what’s practically feasible to experiment on,” he said.
Lopez plans to start his own laboratory straddling New York University’s computer science and biology departments in fall 2025. He will continue to develop new modeling approaches there, with a personal interest in immunology. “Immunology plays such a fundamental role in the human body, and it’s really central to everything, and it’s very difficult in terms of [the] molecular description of what’s happening,” he said.
—Allison DeAngelis
