Swiss fine chemicals company

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.

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.

Benson was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Simon Fraser University in 2016. His graduate work was carried out under the supervision of Profs. D. Leznoff and C. Friesen, focusing on the synthesis of emergent fluorinated groups including an extensive collaboration with DuPont's Experimental Station (Wilmington, DE) and a six-month visiting research fellowship with Prof. T. Ritter at Harvard University. Benson then immediately moved to Switzerland and joined Prof. Antonio Togni's group at ETH as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, developing reagents for late-stage C–H functionalization.

Benson is co-author of a number of high impacting scientific publications, book chapters, patents and conference proceedings. His scientific interests lie in synthetic organofluorine chemistry, spectroscopic techniques, highly reactive radical intermediates, and photoredox catalysis. He is always keen to engage at the interface of chemistry and technology to facilitate access to new synthetic methodologies.