Alex Matter

Professor Alex Matter is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Experimental Therapeutics Centre, and also Chief Executive Officer of the D3 Platform, both part of A*STAR, the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, in Singapore. In addition, he is an Emeritus Professor of the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel, and an Honorary Adjunct Professor of the Department of Pharmacology in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore.

Professor Matter received his medical degree from the University of Basel and undertook research in Switzerland, Britain, France, and the United States before entering the pharmaceutical industry. He worked in Hoffman-LaRoche, before joining CIBA-GEIGY, which became part of Novartis in 1996, where he rose to the position of Global Head of Oncology Research. At Novartis, he led a team of close to two hundred scientists to discover and develop Gleevec® (imatinib), one of the first targeted therapies for cancer, which was given a fast-track approval by FDA in 2001. He was also instrumental in the discovery of Tasigna® (nilotinib), and several therapies for infectious disease.

He was the founding director of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in 2003, where he attracted major grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. He also co-founded the Esperanza Medicines Foundation, a Not-For-Profit organisation that aims to develop affordable drugs for treatment and prevention of AIDS in developing countries.

Professor Matter has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and several book chapters in the area of oncology and haematology. He is the recipient of the 13th Warren-Alpert Prize and the AACR-Bruce F Cain Memorial Award. He has held fellowships at the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Academy for Medical Sciences, and was awarded the Szent-Györgyi Prize by the US National Foundation for Cancer Research in 2013.