Frank Sams-Dodd
Prof. Frank Sams-Dodd
He is Chief Scientific Advisor at Asclepios Bioresearch, CEO at Willingsford Limited and Managing Partner at A Tempo Consulting. He was CEO / VP Preclinical Research at Neurofit SAS / Bionomics Ltd until April 2008 and Head of Psychopharmacololgy at Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH until December 2005. He was the Director of Physiology at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in the areas of obesity and metabolic disorders (January 2002 – February 2003). In January 2001 he received a D.Sc. degree from the Medical Faculty, Copenhagen University for his schizophrenia research. He held a position as Research Fellow at H. Lundbeck A/S, Copenhagen, Denmark in the areas of drug discovery and behavioural pharmacology for CNS disorders. In addition to the scientific work, he has supplemented his education with MBA courses in organization and strategy at the Copenhagen Business School. He has been Chairman of The World Drug Discovery Summit on several occasions, is the Member of the Technology Transfer Committee of the Wellcome Trust and publishes regularly in Drug Discovery Today on drug discovery strategies. He received his master degree from Copenhagen University and his PhD degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA in neurobiology and physiology.
Bert Klebl
Bert Klebl PhD
Bert Klebl is CEO and CSO of the Lead Discovery Center GmbH in Dortmund, Germany. Before the LDC was founded in 2008, he had gathered more than 10 years’ professional experience in drug discovery and early drug development from various positions in the life-science industry, most recently as Senior Director Discovery Biology and Head of Biology at GPC Biotech. Before that he was Axxima’s Vice President Research responsible for discovery and development of the company’s portfolio of kinase inhibitors for various therapeutic indications. His previous positions include Project Team Leader and Senior Scientist with Aventis and Hoechst Marion Roussel. A biochemist by training, he earned his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Konstanz, Germany and did post doctoral work at the Biotechnology Research Institute of the NRC Canada in Montréal, Canada. In the course of his research work he published more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is a co-inventor of more than 15 patents and patent applications.
Gerhard Müller
Gerhard Müller PhD
Gerhard Müller is Senior Vice President of Medicinal Chemistry at Mercachem BV. He is responsible for strategic expansion into medicinal chemistry services, scientific and technical support of business development activities and scientific marketing at Mercachem. He was the Chief Scientific Officer & Managing Director at Proteros Fragments GmbH until May 2011 and Vice President of Drug Discovery at GPC Biotech until June 2008. Dr. Müller joined GPC Biotech in 2005 upon GPC Biotech’s acquisition of Axxima Pharmaceuticals where he held the position of CSO from 2003 to 2005. Prior to his tenure at Axxima Pharmaceutical, Dr. Müller headed the Medicinal Chemistry department at N. V. Organon, the Pharmaceutical Business Unit of Akzo Nobel, from 2001 to 2003. Before 2001 Dr. Müller held various positions within Life Science Research at the Central Research Facilities at Bayer AG which he joined in 1994. He began his professional career as a Medicinal Chemist in the Biomolecular Structure Department of Glaxo Group Research in Verona, Italy. Dr. Müller received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1992 from the group of Prof. Dr. Horst Kessler, Technical University of Munich.
Thomas Schulz
Prof. Thomas Schulz
Qualified as a medical doctor in Mainz (1979), he obtained his MD in 1980 and initially worked in Internal Medicine. He trained as a medical microbiologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology in Mainz (1981 – 1983) and the Institute of Hygiene in Innsbruck (1983 – 1988). Having completed a postdoctoral thesis (“Habilitation”) in 1986, he joined Prof. Robin Weiss’ group at the Institute of Cancer Research, London as an EMBO Fellow in 1988. From 1988 until 1995 he worked mainly on HIV-1,2, HTLV-I and KSHV/HHV8 (from 1994). In 1995 he was appointed to a professorial chair in the Dept. Medical Microbiology of The University of Liverpool, where he worked on KSHV/HHV8. Since 2000 he has been heading the Institute of Virology of Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany. From 1997 until 2003 Dr. Schulz was the editor for retroviruses of The Journal of General Virology. He was the coordinator of the EU FP6 Integrated Project INCA ‘The role of chronic infections in the development of cancer’.
Andrew Wilks
Prof. Andrew Wilks
He is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of SYNthesis med chem and he is the CEO of Catalyst Therapeutics. He was the Chief Scientific Officer, co-CEO, Director and founder of Cytopia and the principal inventor of 5 patents that Cytopia licensed from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He obtained his PhD at, University of Glasgow in 1981. He was a Research Fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland between 1980 and 1983. He held the position of Head, Growth Regulation Laboratory at the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research from 1989 until 1997. He has published more than 85 primary research articles and has been inventor or co-inventor on 12 Australian patents, 9 granted US patents and 4 PCTs.