Leslie Z. Benet


Leslie 'Les' Zachary Benet is an influential pharmaceutical scientist heading the UCSF's Benet Lab at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and recipient of the Remington Medal for distinguished service to American pharmacy.

Early life and education

Leslie Zachary Benet was born on May 17, 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio into a family of pharmacists. His father, Jonas and his uncle, Harry, opened Benet's Pharmacies in Cincinnati in the 1930s and in 1942 founded DARA Products, the first drug company to manufacture hypoallergenic dermatologicals.
Benet received his B.A., B.S., M.S. from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. from the University of California.

Academic career

Benet's early work included noncompartmental methods for calculating clearance and volume of distribution. His paper on the volume of distribution is the most highly cited article in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In 1986 he was a founder and first president of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. For over twenty years, Benet chaired the Department of Pharmacy at the UCSF which, under his leadership, became the Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences. He supervised more than 55
Ph.D. theses and 100 post-doc students. Benet regularly advised the FDA in proposing guidance in the field of bioequivalence. His recent work extended the Biopharmaceutics Classification System, leading to the Biopharmaceutics Drug Disposition Classification System allowing the prediction of enzymes and transporters, transporter-enzyme interplay and transporter-transporter interplay for new molecular entities and drug-drug interactions for already marketed drugs. Benet is listed as one of the "25 Top Pharmacy Professors" in the USA.

Published works

Benet published over 550 articles in peer-reviewed journals, more than 100 book chapters, and seven books.

Honors and awards

Honorary degrees