Moussa B. H. Youdim

Moussa B. H. Youdim was born in 1940 in Tehran

Youdim was born on February 28, 1940, in Tehran, Iran. His father, Eliahoo Youdim, was a businessman, and his mother was Farangiss Lahijani. He went to a Jewish school in Tehran and in 1952 moved to Brighton, England, to attend a Jewish boarding school.

He studied at McGill University in Montreal, where he earned a master's degree in 1964 and a PhD in 1966. His research focused on monoamine oxidase in the liver and brain. He then did postdoctoral work in London from 1966 to 1971, including a study linking foods such as cheese and chocolate to migraine.

From 1973 to 1977 he worked at the University of Oxford. There he studied how iron deficiency affects learning and the brain, and with colleagues began using l-deprenyl (selegiline) as a Parkinson's drug.

In 1977 he moved to Israel and set up the Pharmacology Department at the Technion medical faculty, which he chaired until 1994. With John Finberg and Teva he developed rasagiline, which Teva began selling as Azilect in 2006. He later founded Youdim Pharmaceuticals and is professor emeritus at the Technion.