Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Professor Amidon.

With this award, the Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM) recognizes the extraordinary achievements of Professor Gordon L. Amidon (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA) in the field of pharmaceutical sciences and his outstanding contributions to improving the quality and efficacy of medicinal drugs.

The award ceremony took place during the symposium “Advances in Predictive Biopharmaceutics, Drug Product Quality and Patient Benefit” on July 11, 2025, in Mainz, a joint event organized by Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) and the FFQM.

In his laudatory speech, Prof. Peter Langguth, pharmaceutical technologist at JGU, highlighted Dr. Gordon Amidon’s scientific contributions, which have improved the understanding of drug absorption and significantly influenced the assessment of the equivalence of generic drugs through in vitro studies. He played a decisive role in the development of the Biopharmaceutical Classification System (BCS) and its regulatory implementation as the BCS-based biowaiver concept.

Professor Langguth, his students, and the FFQM congratulate the award winner on this well-deserved honor.

The innovative proposals developed by Prof. Amidon have influenced work in both the pharmaceutical industry and drug regulatory agencies worldwide. Quality standards in all areas of formulation development for oral drugs are now set on the basis of the BCS.

Since 1983, the award winner has been a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Michigan, a position he initially held concurrently with that of research director of a division of SmithKline Consumer Products. In 2018, he was named Distinguished University Professor, the highest honor at the University of Michigan. He is internationally recognized for his research on gastrointestinal absorption, solubility, dissolution, bioequivalence, and prodrugs.

Professor Amidon has received numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala, Sweden, and Lisbon, Portugal. He has authored over 400 scientific articles and book chapters, holds 20 patents, and has supervised more than 120 doctoral and postdoctoral students. He has led two of the most prestigious organizations in the field of science, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and the Controlled Release Society (CRS). Dr. Amidon was the founder and long-time editor-in-chief of the scientific Journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Previous recipients of the Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines Lifetime Achievement Award are

Prof. Dr. José Augusto Guimarães Morais, Department of Pharmacological Sciences, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon, Portugal (2021),

Prof. Dr. Laszlo Endrenyi, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Toronto, Canada (2021),

Professor Dr. Leslie Z. Benet, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of California, San Francisco/USA (2023), and

Professor A. Atilla Hincal, Pharmaceutical Technology, Hacettepe University, Ankara/Turkey (2024).