Fritz R. Buhler, MD is Professor of Pharmaceutical Medicine and Pathophysiology as well as of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Basel. He was Director of the Department of Research at the University Hospitals in Basel, Switzerland. Prof Buhler qualified in 1965 at the University of Basel. Between 1970 and 1973 he worked at Columbia University in New York and in 1977 as a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In 1988 he became Professor of Pathophysiology in Basel. Prof. Buler was Head of world-wide Clinical Research and Development at Hoffmann-La Roche from 1991 to 1995. For twenty years, he was the director of the European Center of Pharmaceutical Medicine (ECPM) at the Medical Faculty and PharmaCenter of the University of Basel. He is on the Board of the Center for Drug Development Science at UCSF in Washington DC and co-founder of the American and Chinese Courses on Drug Development and Regulatory Sciences in 2007/2008 as well as a Chinese version at Peking University. He was on the Executive Committee of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. Fritz R. Buhler co-founded in 1998 the International Biomedicine Management Partners Inc. in Basel, a venture management organization and he was a Managing Partner at Bear Stearns Health Innoventures in New York 2000-2008. He is also a co-founder and promoter of the trinational BioValley at the Upper Rhine as well as BioValley Basel and Swiss Biotech. In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate of the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, and in 2004 an honorary membership of the Swiss Association of Pharmaceutical Professionals, which he founded in 1995. He now leads a Pharmaceutical Medicine Training Programme, PharmaTrain, part of the Innovative Medicines Initiative in Europe.