Prof. em. Dr. Pius August Schubiger

Pius August Schubiger was since October 1, 1997 until his retirement on July 31, 2010 full Professor of Radiopharmacy at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the ETH Zurich. He headed the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Science of the Paul Scherrer Institute, the  ETH and the Clinic and Polyclinic for Nuclear Medicine at the University of Zurich.

He was born on May 19, 1945 in Uznach SG. He studied at the University of Zurich. He received his Ph.D. with a dissertation in radiochemistry in 1972. After one year of postdoctoral work in radiochemistry at the then Federal Institute for Reactor Physics, there followed one year of working as an IAEA expert in Brazil and two and a half years at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, with Prof. W. Gentner. Since 1979 he has worked in the Radiopharmacy Division of the Paul Scherrer Institute of which he has been the head since 1989. In 1992 habilitation ensued in nuclear medicine (spec. radiopharmacy) and in 1993 collaboration with the former Department of Applied Biosciences at the ETH.

The main activities of the radiopharmacy research are the development of radioactively labeled molecules which bind specifically in vivo to defined structures (e.g. receptors or antigens). Such functional radiopharmaceuticals can serve both as diagnostic agents in nuclear medicine and as therapeutic agents for use against tumor metastases. Since October 2009 he is a fellow at Collegium Helveticum, which is the interdisciplinary research institute of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich.