Dr. Franz Hefti Chief Scientific Officer Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc.

Dr. Franz Hefti has over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry and over a decade of experience in academia. Dr. Hefti led the drug development efforts at Rinat Neuroscience Corporation as Executive Vice President of Drug Development for three years. During his tenure, three antibody drug candidates advanced... read morefrom the discovery stage to preclinical and clinical development, and the success of these programs led to the acquisition of Rinat Neuroscience by Pfizer in 2006. Previously, Dr. Hefti was Senior Vice President of Neuroscience Research at Merck & Co., where he coordinated the company's neuroscience research worldwide, serving as site head for the neuroscience research centers in the U.K. and U.S. While working with Merck, small molecule drug candidates covering six drug targets in the neuroscience area were taken into development. Dr. Hefti was also Director of the Neuroscience Research Department at Genentech and previously spent more than a decade in academia as a Professor at the University of Southern California and Associate Professor at the University of Miami, where he carried out seminal research on therapeutic applications of neurotrophic factors. He has published over 250 papers on neurotrophic factors and topics in neuropharmacology and a recent textbook "Drug Discovery for Nervous System Diseases" (John Wiley & Sons). Dr. Hefti received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich and did his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute in Munich.