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Dr. Yamina Berchiche: Beyond the Lab — From Chemokine Receptors to the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem

Dr. Yamina Berchiche spent two decades working on G protein-coupled receptors at the bench — training that spanned chemokine receptor conformational dynamics at the Université de Montréal, CXCR3 splice-variant signaling at Rockefeller University in Dr. Tom Sakmar's lab, CRISPR knockout generation at NIAID, and class B peptide receptor work at Generate Biomedicines. Across those stops, one observation kept resurfacing: the GPCR field is enormous — roughly 400 non-olfactory receptors — but clinical drug discovery has reached only about 166 of them, leaving more than 250 receptors unstudied at anything close to therapeutic depth. This conversation traces the scientific arc that led Dr. Berchiche to leave the bench after a COVID-era redundancy, and examines the motivation behind founding Dr. GPCR — an ecosystem of podcasts, newsletters, summits, and working spaces designed to give the field connective tissue it has historically lacked. For Dr. Berchiche, this work is personal: the receptors she helped characterize for years belong to a family she believes has been collectively underserved by the infrastructure around it, and building that infrastructure has become a full-time scientific question in its own right.

About the Guest

Dr. Yamina Berchiche is the founder of the Dr. GPCR ecosystem and the host of the Dr. GPCR Podcast. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the Université de Montréal, where she trained in Dr. Nikolaus Heveker's lab at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center on chemokine receptor structure–function relationships, with extensive collaborative work in Dr. Michel Bouvier's lab on BRET-based conformational readouts. She completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in Dr. Tom Sakmar's lab, where she characterized the signaling diversity of three alternative splice variants of CXCR3. Her career has moved through academic pharmacology, a research fellowship in B-cell molecular immunology at NIAID, and a senior scientist role at Generate Biomedicines, where she worked on class B peptide receptor engineering using AI-driven protein design. She now builds scientific community infrastructure for the GPCR field.

Scientific Themes of the Conversation

Chemokine receptor redundancy and the shift toward functional selectivity as a framework
Splice variants as signaling variants — CXCR3 as a case study for transcript-level diversity
The orphan-majority problem in GPCR drug discovery — why ~250 non-olfactory receptors remain outside clinical attention
Career architecture for bench pharmacologists moving beyond academia and biotech
Scientific community as infrastructure — what connective tissue a 400-receptor field actually needs
Assay design as the lever that shifts conceptual frameworks

Key Insights from the Conversation

Rejection as redirection. The summer placement Dr. Berchiche didn't get in Michel Bouvier's lab led her to Nikolaus Heveker's newly opened lab at CHU Sainte-Justine, where she was the first student. The lab had no equipment, only stacks of bills on every bench — and a research program on chemokines and chemokine receptors that would define her career.

The redundancy assumption crumbled under better assays. The chemokine system — roughly 50 ligands for 20 receptors — was framed for decades as redundant because multiple chemokines bind multiple receptors. Dr. Berchiche's thesis work on CXCR4 mutants and her PhD characterization of natural chemokines binding CCR2B showed the opposite: distinct ligands activate distinct signaling outputs, and functional selectivity was quietly hiding inside what had been called promiscuity.

Splice variants aren't just structural — they signal differently. Her Rockefeller work on the three alternative splice variants of CXCR3, initially prompted by a simple question from Tom Sakmar, demonstrated that variants encoded by the same gene can recruit different signaling outputs in response to the same ligands. The implication: transcript-level diversity is itself a signaling mechanism, not a cloning artifact to be collapsed away.

The 250-receptor problem sits in plain sight. Of roughly 400 non-olfactory GPCRs, only about 166 are being targeted or studied for clinical application. The remaining 250+ are not obscure — they are simply not connected to drug-discovery momentum. This gap, visible in the 2017 mapping work by Dr. Alexander Hauser and colleagues, is the motivating tension behind Dr. GPCR.

The 30,000-foot view requires leaving the bench. After nearly two decades in the lab, Dr. Berchiche found that deep focus on one project was no longer fulfilling. The bench scientist's perspective — which she explicitly values — comes at the cost of the field-level view that ecosystem-building requires, and choosing between them turned out to be a real career architecture decision rather than a detour.

Community is scientific infrastructure, not marketing. A podcast, a monthly newsletter, and a virtual summit are not promotional surfaces. They are the connective tissue a 400-receptor field uses to exchange techniques, ideas, and trust across institutional boundaries. Without that tissue, GPCRs stay siloed by receptor family and by lab.

Building during a pandemic is a design constraint, not a footnote. Dr. GPCR was founded in March 2020 after a COVID-era redundancy at Generate Biomedicines. Early episodes were recorded in a Toyota Prius parked outside a gym with public Wi-Fi, and then in a closet studio her husband built so she could keep the AC running without bleeding background noise into the audio. The ecosystem's physical origins are inseparable from its founding conviction.

Episode Timeline

Timestamps were generated using AI for readability.

00:00 Introduction

02:25 The closet studio and what's in the talk

04:00 From Oradea to Montreal — the geography of a GPCR career

06:30 An empty lab and the chemokine redundancy problem

09:00 A master's, old-school molecular biology, and an accelerated JBC paper

11:00 CCR2B, functional selectivity, and a stellar reviewer moment

14:00 Rockefeller, CXCR3, and three splice variants that weren't the same

17:00 NIH and the pull toward a 30,000-foot view of the field

21:00 COVID, redundancy, and the 250 GPCRs nobody studies

23:08 Building the Dr. GPCR ecosystem

32:28 Q&A — preparing an episode, funding, and what's next

46:53 Recording Brian Roth from a Prius — the closet-studio origin story

Selected Quotes

"You have 400 non-olfactory GPCRs. Only about 166 of them are being targeted and studied for clinical applications. But you have 250-plus receptors that are not well characterized enough and are not considered for the treatment of any diseases."

"If you want to advance the field and you want to drug GPCRs better, the point is not to show that you can pipette, but the point is to get to that result."

"At NIH, I decided that I wanted to go what you'd call the dark side, which I don't think it's the dark side."

"Brian throughout his career was told so many times that he should quit science. And thank God he did not quit science. That's the kind of story that I like to share in the podcast."

About this episode

GPCRs have played a central role in my scientific career ever since I took Dr. Michel Bouvier’s class as an undergraduate student at the University of Montreal in early 2000. During the past 2 decades, my research mainly focused on chemokine receptor structure/function relationships. For the purposes of this presentation, I will walk you through my various career experiences and include the skills I learned during each experience, which ultimately led me to found Dr. GPCR. Last, I will give an overview of the various programs we established at Dr. GPCR, present our team as well as provide you with a sneak peek of our future podcast guests and more.

I gave a talk on October 12th at the 3rd ERNEST meeting about the Dr.GPCR Ecosystem. I want to say thank you to the ERNEST meeting organizers for the invitation with special thanks to Dr. Martha Summer and Dr. Alexander Hauser, and Luise Wagner.