Pharmaceutical Biology

Professor Altmann was born in 1957 in Hochheim/Main, Germany. He studied chemistry at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, from where he graduated with a diploma in 1983. His subsequent Ph. D. work in the area of peptide chemistry was performed at the University of Basel from 1984-1986. He then spent two and a half years as a post-doctoral associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, which was followed by a one year stay as a “maître assistant” at the University of Lausanne. In Sept. 1990 he joined Ciba-Geigy’s Central Research Laboratories in Basel, where he worked on the design and synthesis of modified nucleosides as potential building blocks for antisense therapeutics until 1996. He became a group leader and vice-head of the Nucleic Acid Chemistry unit. In 1997, he moved to Oncology Research within Novartis Pharma AG, which had been formed through the merger between Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. After four years as a project leader in Oncology Research, where he championed the advancement of epothilone B (EPO906, patupilone) into human clinical trials, he was appointed the Novartis Senior Chemistry Expert in 2000. From Jan. 2003 until his move to the ETH in July of the saem year, he was the acting Global Head of Chemistry of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). In 1998, he received the “Novartis Leading Scientist Award”.

In July of 2003, Karl-Heinz Altmann became a full professor at the ETH Zürich. His research interests are at the interface between chemistry and biology, with a particular focus on the chemical synthesis and the biological and pharmacological profiling of biologically active natural products and their synthetic and semi-synthetic analogs. This research on one hand aims at the understanding of the mechanism of action of such molecules and the elucidation of the structural requirements for biological activity. On the other hand, it tries to assess the therapeutic potential of such compounds with the ultimate goal to discover new therapeutics for clinical applications.