Simone Tortoioli PhD

Simone Tortoioli was born in Perugia (Italy) where he pursued undergraduate studies in Chemistry achieving a Master degree in 2000. He completed his PhD in 2005 at the same university in the group of Professors F. Fringuelli and F. Pizzo developing in close knit with Dr. L. Vaccaro the use of Lewis and Brönsted catalysts for the ring opening of oxiranes in water or under solvent-free conditions. He then moved to Geneva (Switzerland) for a postdoctoral stay with Professor J. Lacour where he was involved in the development of asymmetric Ru(II)-catalyzed Carroll rearrangement.

He joined GSK at the end of 2006 at the research center in Verona (Italy) as senior scientist in the synthetic chemistry group of Chemical Development, with the tasks of optimizing and preparing for scale-up synthetic routes to APIs to support Phase I and II in the CNS area as well as developing 2nd generation routes.

He moved to Basel (Switzerland) to work as Lab Head with Actelion Pharmaceuticals in the Process Research group led by Dr. Stefan Abele. In this role, he has been responsible for the route scouting and scale-up of new APIs up to the first 1-2 kg to support preclinical studies and preparing for Phase I manufacturing. In 2013 he was promoted to Senior Lab. Head. Following a demerge of Actelion in June 2017, Simone Tortoioli is currently Lab Head/Senior Scientist in Chemical Development at the newly created Idorsia Pharmaceuticals.