Board of Directors & Executive Management

Mr. Hans-Beat Gürtler Member of the Board	Dr. Rudolf Gygax Vice Chairman of the Board	Dr. Peter Rickli Member of the Board
Dr. Alfred Scheidegger Chairman of the Board	Dr. Mátyás Végh CEO

Mr. Hans-Beat Gürtler, Member of the Board of Directors

Hans-Beat Gürtler received a commercial education and has spent most of his professional career with Ciba-Geigy and Novartis. Having held various leadership positions in the Agribusiness and Animal Health sectors, both in Switzerland and abroad, he became the global CEO of Novartis Animal Health in 1990. Following twelve successful years in this position, he joined, in 2002, Varuma, a private investor. Hans Beat Gürtler currently serves as a board member and president in several companies.
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Dr. Rudolf Gygax, Vice Chairman

Dr. Rudolf Gygax is the Managing Director of the Novartis Venture Fund (Basel, Switzerland) since 1997. For almost twenty years prior to this, he held various positions in the management of research and development at Ciba, including process safety and high-technology materials research. Rudolf Gygax studied physical chemistry at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Stanford University, California, before joining Ciba-Geigy in 1978. Dr. Gygax heads the Start-up Fund and also serves as a director on the boards of several start-up companies in which the Novartis Venture Fund holds an equity stake.
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Dr. Peter Rickli, Member of the Board of Directors

Dr. Peter Rickli is a Partner at Christen Rickli Partners, a Basel-based law firm. Dr. Rickli was admitted to the bar in 1978 and holds a doctoral degree in tax law. Dr. Rickli worked for nine years for the department of finance of the canton Basel-City and spent nine years as a member of group legal services at Sandoz (now Novartis), Basel. Since 1996, Dr. Rickli has been active as a lawyer in Basel, and became a member of the cantonal chamber of appeal for taxation of Basel in 1999.
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Dr. Alfred Scheidegger, Chairman of the Board of Directors

Dr. Alfred Scheidegger is the founder of Nextech Venture and Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Genetics Company. Until 1998, Mr. Scheidegger was the managing director and a member of the board of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. Prior to that, he had served as the first managing director of the Swiss Scientific Computing Center (CSCS) and had worked with Ciba-Geigy Ltd., Japan (now Novartis), in agrobiotechnology. Mr. Scheidegger holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and has completed a two-year post-doctorate research fellowship in biotechnology at the University of Kyoto, Japan. In addition, he has completed the Executive Training program at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA. He also co-initiated "Venture 98", the first national business plan contest of Switzerland.
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