Innovative chemistry solutions provider

Peter brings a wealth of start-up and industry experience from small and large biotech companies. He was co-founder and acting CEO of Xigen Pharma and was previously head of Business Development at Modex Therapeutics, playing a key role for its IPO on the Swiss Stock exchange. 

Prior to this, he was Head of Market Research and Business Planning with Amgen Europe where he led a pan-European market research organization. Before that he worked in various managerial positions with DuPont de Nemours in manufacturing, sales and Business Development. 

As a CTI Startup coach, he has coached the founders and CEOs of over 30 Swiss life science companies.

Erick obtained a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign and a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. After carrying out postdoctoral work with Peter Dervan at the California Institute of Technology through late 1992, he joined the faculty at the same institution and was promoted to the rank of full professor. Since 1998, he has been full professor of Organic Chemistry at the ETH Zürich. He is the recipient of many academic and industrial awards. His research program focuses on the asymmetric synthesis of biologically active, stereochemically complex, natural products.

Recent advances from the Carreira group in the design of novel building blocks for drug discovery have had a high impact in the pharmaceutical industry and are the basis of the foundation of SpiroChem AG, Swiss fine chemicals company.

Breaking News: Since 2020, Erick is an elected member of the National Academy of Science of the USA... congrats Erick!

Thomas studied chemistry in France (ENSC, Montpellier) and the UK (UMIST, Manchester) and obtained a PhD degree from the university of Nottingham, UK.

After research appointments at the School of Pharmacy in Nottingham and ETH Zürich, Thomas joined Lipideon Biotechnology AG in 2007. As Head of the Drug Discovery and Chemistry, he lead a multi-disciplinary team that discovered a candidate for pre-clinical investigation (Non-Systemic Cholesterol Absorption Inhibitor).

In 2011, Thomas co-founded SpiroChem AG, Swiss fine chemicals company and serves as CEO of the company.

Thomas has several years of experience in the management of R&D projects, including medicinal chemistry, design of innovative building blocks for drug discovery and development of new process routes.

Florent has over 10 years of accomplishments in the Pharma/Biotech industry. His professional experience includes the discovery, process and preclinical development of various protein kinase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer (PQR309, FDA Orphan Drug Designation in 2016) and CNS disorders (PQR620), and a successful technology transfer (2009) with New England Biolabs (SNAP-tag®, CLIP-tag™).

Florent received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Bern in 2004, and carried out postdoctoral work on total synthesis with Alois Fürstner at the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung in 2005. He was Head of Chemistry and Quality Control at Covalys Biosciences AG (Switzerland) (2005 - 2009), Senior Researcher at the Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel (2009 - 2012) and Deputy Head of Chemistry at PIQUR Therapeutics AG (2012 - 2016).

Florent is co-author of numerous high impact scientific publications and co-inventor of 10 patents in the areas of drug discovery, process development and biological research.

Ben has broad medicinal chemistry experience across avariety of therapeutic areas including infectious disease, inflammation, pain, neurodegeneration & psychiatry. His scientific interests include creation of strategic research collaborations and evaluation of novel technologies for drug discovery, with a particular focus on AI and novel screening technologies. Currently Ben is responsible for Open Innovation Discovery at Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative, a not-for-profit research organization based in Geneva Switzerland. Previously Ben held senior research positions at a variety of drug discovery companies including Genkyotex SA, Addex Therapeutics SA and UCB Pharma. He is cofounder of AiDD SA and MPC Therapeutics SARL. Ben holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Imperial College London and an MBA from IE Business School, Madrid.

David was born and raised in Slovenia, where he obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry (University of Ljubljana). He carried out his undergraduate research with Prof. K. C. Nicolaou at Scripps and Prof. Samuel J. Danishefsky at Columbia. He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry with Prof. K. C. Nicolaou involving the total synthesis of complex natural products. David then joined Prof. Erick M. Carreira's group at ETH as a postdoctoral fellow and explored the field of asymmetric catalysis. In the fall of 2014 David joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

David also serves as an Scientific Advisor of SpiroChem.

Laurence is Innovation Solutions Developer at SpiroChem. In her role she drives innovation development strategy to further consolidate the company’s position as a leading provider for innovative chemistry solutions.

Prior to joining SpiroChem, Laurence was an Innovation Project Manager at Prestwick Chemical. Overall, she has more than 18 years of international experience in the life science industry, with hands-on laboratory experience and profound medicinal chemistry expertise in diversified therapeutic areas such as oncology, CNS, antiviral, antibacterial, cosmetics.

Laurence graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (2001) and obtained her PhD in medicinal chemistry at the University of Strasbourg (2010).

Kristina establishes and manages strategic R&D alliances with international pharma, biotech and academic institutions. She builds scientific and business relationships with new potential clients and partners in the USA and Europe.

Kristina received her MS degree in chemistry from Moscow State University. She completed her PhD at the University of Basel in the field of chemical enzymology, where her research was focused on understanding the mechanism of a novel enzyme called sulfoxide synthase. Kristina is an active member of the Swiss Chemical Society, EFMC and EFMC-YSN where she helps to strengthen the communication between pharmaceutical industry and young chemists.

Rob was educated (MA, D. Phil) at the University of Oxford and undertook post-doctoral work at The University of Chicago before joining Wellcome, from where he navigated mergers and acquisitions in the formation of GSK during his industrial career.

Rob brings 30+ years of experience in drug discovery, which provides substantive hands on and leadership experience to provide consultancy service. His career encompassed work across all stages of the discovery process from program initiation, through hit/lead identification (using all methods from fragments, through ligand based design, HTS and DNA encoded libraries) and lead optimization to candidate selections across many targets and therapeutic areas. His pioneering work property based design, advocating low fat, low flat principles, is very much aligned to SpiroChem’s expertise in novel sp3-rich scaffolds and isosteres.

Nick Terrett is a medicinal chemist who has worked in drug discovery for over 35 years in both large pharmaceutical (GSK, Pfizer, Merck) and small biotech companies (Ensemble Therapeutics) across the UK, US, and Switzerland. He has advanced several candidates into the clinic and was chemistry project leader and inventor for sildenafil (marketed as ViagraTM and Revatio™). Nick has also worked on new discovery technologies establishing Pfizer’s first combinatorial chemistry platform and while at Ensemble Therapeutics developed DNA-encoded chemistry libraries and advanced macrocycles as valuable ‘beyond Rule of 5’ modalities. Nick is based in New Jersey and advises biotech and chemical services companies.

Marc holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Strasbourg and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodward Research Institute in Basel, Switzerland.

Marc has more than 30 years of experience in medicinal chemistry from various fields of research related to antibiotics, antivirals and oncology. Until 2013, he was Executive Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Unit for Oncology in Basel, and a member of the Global Oncology Decision Board at Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research. During his career, he contributed to three compounds currently on the market: Femara®(aromatase inhibitor); Reyataz® (HIV-protease inhibitor); Tasigna® (Bcr/Abl kinase inhibitor).