Prof. Dr. Alex Matter has joined the Board of Directors of Singaporean Nanostart holding Curiox Biosystems. Dr. Matter is 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, Dr. Matter 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. In a short span of 3 years, Glivec/Gleevec® was given a very rare, fast track FDA approval in 2001.
He was the founding director of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases and is Chief Executive Officer of the Experimental Therapeutics Centre (ETC), both located in Singapore. During his long career in the pharmaceutical industry Dr. Matter has held several positions of responsibility such as Head of Pharmaceutical Research at Hoffman-LaRoche, Head of Cancer and Viral Research at CIBA-GEIGY and more recently Global Head of Oncology Research, at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation. Dr. Alex Matter, received his medical degree from the University of Basel. He has authored over 100 scientific articles and book chapters in the areas of oncology and hematology. He is the recipient of the 13th Warren-Alpert prize in 2000 and the AACR-Bruce F. Cain Memorial Award.
Matter comments his service in the Board of Directors of Curiox: "I am looking forward to work with Curiox which pursues innovative, cutting-edge technologies in the field of high throughput screening and establishes itself in a rapidly growing hightech market segment."
Namyong Kim, CEO of Curiox, believes that Matter´s huge experience and network will assure the success of new DropArray™ products that are going to be launched in the next few months for the pharmaceutical and biotech market. Kim says: “The ready acceptance of the invitation by Dr. Matter in joining the Board shows the strength and promise of Curiox's unique DropArray™ technology in innovating the ways of preclinical drug discovery are performed. I look forward to working with him in building Curiox into one of major bioinstrumentation companies.”