| Leslie Z. Benet | |
| Birth Place: | Cincinnati, Ohio |
| Occupation: | Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, School of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of California |
| Professor | |
| Spouse: | Carol |
| Discipline: | Pharmacology |
| Sub Discipline: | Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, Bioequivalence |
| Alma Mater: | UCSF |
| Thesis Title: | Thermodynamics of Chelation by Tetracyclines |
| Thesis Year: | 1965 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Jere Goyan |
| Workplaces: | Washington State University, University of California |
Leslie 'Les' Zachary Benet (born May 17, 1937) 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.
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. (English, 1959), B.S. (Pharmacy, 1960), M.S. (Pharmaceutical Chemistry, 1962) from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. (Pharmaceutical Chemistry, 1965) from the University of California.
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 (cited more than 900 times out of 19,000 articles). 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 55Ph.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.
Benet published over 570 articles in peer-reviewed journals, more than 100 book chapters, and seven books.