Frank Stappenbeck PhD

Frank Stappenbeck serves as the Director of Chemistry at MAX BioPharma. Since joining the company, he has spent more than two decades working with drug discovery teams in the pharmaceutical industry during previous appointments at Elan Pharmaceuticals, ICOS Corporation, SGX-Pharmaceuticals, and Fate Therapeutics. He has worked on drug chemistry problems in the areas of oncology, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease, and regenerative medicine. His experience includes structure-based design, fragment-based drug discovery, and drug screening based on phenotypic assays.

Dr. Stappenbeck first became interested in chemistry as an undergraduate student at the University of Göttingen in Germany before completing a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry at Oregon State University and postdoctoral training at UC Irvine. Informed and encouraged by his training, Dr. Stappenbeck has developed an ongoing interest in the chemistry and pharmacological properties of naturally occurring substances, such as alkaloids and sterols, as worthwhile starting points in drug discovery research.