Claus Braestrup 17 January 1945 to 7 February 2023.

Abstract

In the summer of 2002, I was elected president of the 17th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology, WorldPharma2010, among others because the three major Danish pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk, Leo Pharma and H. Lundbeck A/S had promised significant sponsorships. One month later, I began a one-year sabbatical at the Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, and one day in November 2002 I received an e-mail from the famous psychopharmacologist Claus Bræstrup who asked me to give him a call. At the time, he was the research director of H. Lundbeck A/S in Copenhagen. I knew him relatively well but I was not used to receiving e-mails from him, so my first thought was “Oh my gosh, is there a problem with the sponsorship?” But it was not so. It turned out that he was also the chairman of the board of directors of Pharmacology & Toxicology, and he was looking for a new editor-in-chief of the journal to replace Jens S. Schou,1 who at the time had been running the journal for more than 40 years. He wanted to ask me if that could be something for me? To be honest, I was a bit reluctant because I knew that organizing WorldPharma2010 would take a lot of my time, but fortunately I ended up by saying “yes,” and this is one of the best decisions I have made in my career. I went back to Copenhagen for a short meeting with Claus and to sign the contract. This was the only time we met in the context of the journal, because a few weeks later he stepped down as chairman as he had become the president and chief executive of H. Lundbeck A/S. Both of Claus' parents were physicians but he took a different lead and earned a bachelor of engineering in 1967 and a master of biochemistry from University of Copenhagen in 1971. He was a research fellow at the Laboratory of Psychopharmacology at the Psychiatric Hospital Sct. Hans in Roskilde, Denmark from 1971 to 1976. It was here, he discovered the benzodiazepine receptor2 which in fact is not an independent receptor but rather an allosteric modulatory binding site on the GABA-A receptor, and this made him world famous. From 1976 to 1984, he was head of psychopharmacology research at the pharmaceutical company Ferrosan, and when it was acquired by Novo Nordisk, he became head of Pharma Research and Development of Novo Pharma and later of the CNS division and finally of insulin research. In 1994, he was headhunted by the German drug company Schering AG in Berlin, where he was head of the central research division, but 4 years later, he returned to Copenhagen to become executive vice-president of Research and Development at H. Lundbeck A/S until he became the CEO. He retired from H. Lundbeck A/S in 2008. For years, Claus Bræstrup was also a member of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters, the National Health Science Research Council, and The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. From 1988 to 1993, Claus Bræstrup was an adjunct professor in neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen and he was awarded the Lundbeck Prize in 1984.