Covagen nominates Franz Hefti as new member of the Board of Directors
Covagen announced the nomination of Dr. Franz Hefti to its Board of Directors.
Franz Hefti is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals (Philadelphia, US), a company pioneering the development of imaging agents for neurodegenerative diseases. After successfully completing Phase III clinical trials with the amyloid plaque imaging agent Florbetapir, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals was acquired by Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, US) in 2010 for an upfront of USD 300 million and up to USD 500 million in additional payments contingent upon regulatory and commercial milestones.
Previously, Franz Hefti was Executive Vice President of Drug Development at the Genentech spin-out company Rinat Neuroscience Corporation (San Francisco, US), where he brought antibody therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and chronic pain from discovery research to clinical development, which led to the acquisition of Rinat by Pfizer Inc. (New York, US) in 2006.
Before joining Rinat, Franz Hefti was Senior Vice President of Neuroscience Research at Merck & Co (Whitehouse Station, US) and Director of the Neuroscience Research Department at Genentech (San Francisco, US). Prior to starting his industrial career, Franz Hefti spent more than a decade in academia as a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Associate Professor at the University of Miami, where he carried out seminal research on therapeutic applications of neurotrophic factors. Franz Hefti received his PhD from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and did his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, US) and the Max Planck Institute in Munich (Germany).
After having served for more than four years as Chairman and member of Covagen’s Board of Directors, Dr. Rudolf Gygax will retire from this position.
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