Ralph Schönleber is a chemist by training, with a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Basel, studying coumarins as photoactive protecting groups. Ralph joined Bachem AG in 2003 as a team leader at the Research and Development Department. After increasing responsibilities in the fields of process development (scale-up strategies for all amounts of peptide products), process research and synthesis of custom and catalog products, he became Head of the GMP Process Development Department in 2012. Currently, Ralph is Vice President Research and Development at Bachem AG and member of Bachem’s International Research Committee.

After completing his training, he worked as a chemical laboratory technician at Ciba-Geigy AG and as a production chemist at F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG from 1984 to 1997. After holding various management positions at Siegfried AG in Zofingen, Switzerland, Roland Schürmann became Head of Chemical Production in 2004. Parallel to his work, he was a lecturer in chemical technology at the vocational college in Aarau from 1999-2015. Roland Schürmann holds a degree in chemistry from the Burgdorf School of Engineering. Roland Schürmann joined Bachem Americas, Inc. in Torrance, California, in 2016. He was initially Vice President Manufacturing and was appointed Site Manager Torrance in May 2017. In mid-2020, Roland Schürmann became COO of the Bachem Group and a member of the Executive Committee. Since retiring from the Group Executive Board at the end of 2023, he has been in charge of setting up an Operational Excellence unit for Bachem.

Dr. Tycho Leifels received his PhD in organic chemistry from the University in Basel in 1999 and got his start in industry as product manager at Pfizer. He became group product manager at Mepha in 2005 and moved into more strategic positions, acting as director of Marketing, Portfolio management, Pipeline and Strategy Management for various pharmaceutical companies before his current position as group leader Product Management at Bachem.

Kira Mounier received a master’s degree in pharmaceutical science from the University of Basel. She gained experience in the pharmaceutical industry by consulting for a pharma and MedTech start-ups before joining Bachem in 2021 as Sales and Business Development Manager for generic peptides. Her current focus is on the sales of complex generic peptide drugs that need yet to be developed or optimized to be fit for market authorization upon patent expiry.