Prof. Dr. Dario Neri

Dario Neri was born in Rome on 1. May 1963 and grew up in Siena (Italy). He studied Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and earned a PhD in Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Professor Kurt Wüthrich (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2002). After a post-doctoral research internship (1992-1996) at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Sir Gregory Winter (Nobel Prize Chrmistry 2018), he became professor at ETH Zürich in 1996. Dario Neri has been Full Professor of Biomacromolecules at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich. In October 2020, he moved full-time to Philogen ( www.philogen.com), a Swiss-Italian Biotech Company which he had co-founded in 1996 and in which he currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, while retaining the ETH Professor title. He is also Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK.   The research activities of the Neri group and of Philogen focus on the engineering of therapeutic antibodies for the therapy of cancer and other angiogenesis-related disorders and on the development of DNA-encoded chemical libraries. Two of the antibody products of Philogen are currently being investigated in Phase III clinical trials in Europe and in the United States, while the broader clinical-stage pipeline of Philogen is composed both of antibody-based and of small molecule-based pharmaceuticals.   Dario Neri has published more than 450 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the recipient of the ISOBM Abbott Prize 2000, of the Amgen-Dompe’ Biotec Award 2000, of the Mangia d’Oro 2001, of the Prous Award 2006 of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry, of the Robert-Wenner-Prize 2007 of the Swiss Cancer League, of the SWISS BRIDGE Award 2008, of the Prix Mentzer of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society in 2011, of the Phoenix Prize 2014, of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015, the 6th World ADC Award in 2019, the Paul Harris Fellow Award in 2022 and the Pratesi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society 2023