Dr. Alex Matter

Biography

 A medical doctor by training, Alex followed his degree from the University of Basel with immunology and pathology research in Switzerland, Britain, France and USA before entering into the pharmaceutical industry. He has published more than 100 scientific articles plus several book chapters in the area of oncology and hematology. He is the recipient of the 13th Warren-Alpert prize and the AACR-Bruce F. Cain Memorial Award. He also was Associate Professor at the Medical School of the University of Basel for several decades and held fellowships at the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Academy for Medical Sciences. Alex is probably best known for his contribution to the development of Glivec/Gleevec, one of the world’s first tyrosine kinase inhibitor drugs against chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Starting in the mid-eighties, he led a team of close to 200 scientists at Novartis to discover and optimize the lead compound and brought it all the way through its first clinical trial in 1998. Alex was the founding director for the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in 2003 in Singapore. NITD also joined the Singapore Dengue consortium and the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) under the Singapore Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) since 2005, a member of the A*STAR Investigatorship Selection Panel in 2007 and was a member of the Experimental Therapeutics Centre (ETC) Project Review Committee in 2008. Alex is currently CEO of ETC (since 2009) and also CEO of the D3 platform (since 2012). Before coming to Singapore, Alex has held several positions of leadership such as Head of Cancer research at Hoffman-LaRoche, Head of Cancer and Virology Research at CIBA-GEIGY and more recently Global Head of Oncology Research, at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation till 2003. Besides Glivec, his distinguished career with Novartis also includes heading drug discovery programs for anti-infectives and AIDS/HIV. Alex also co-founded the Esperanza Medicines Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to develop affordable drugs for treatment and prevention of AIDS in developing countries.

Research Interest

 Molecular Biology and Molecular genetics