Founder in Residence, Unlocking systemic drug delivery for brain & CNS disease

Join us to build: we’re seeking entrepreneurially-minded scientists with deep technical expertise, who are eager to solve one of the most durable and consequential challenges in medicine through venture building. This role offers a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of CNS drug delivery, leading a company that makes it fundamentally easier, safer and more broadly applicable to get therapeutics into the brain.

The role is full-time, remote initially until venture incorporation and spin-out (circa end of 2027), location TBD.

The Opportunity: CNS diseases represent one of the largest and most persistent unmet needs in medicine. Over 1 billion people worldwide live with a neurological condition, yet disease-modifying treatments remain elusive for the vast majority - from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to multiple sclerosis and rare paediatric neurological disorders. The failure rate in CNS drug development is among the highest of any therapeutic area, and a central reason is not a lack of therapeutic targets: it is our inability to reliably deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

The BBB is a highly specialised endothelial barrier that protects the brain from pathogens and toxins - but in doing so, it excludes the vast majority of therapeutic molecules. Fewer than 2% of small molecules cross the BBB in meaningful quantities, and almost no large-format biologics - antibodies, proteins, nucleic acids - reach the brain parenchyma without specialised delivery mechanisms. This has forced the field into a narrow set of workarounds: direct intracranial injection, high-dose systemic administration with poor CNS penetration, or compromising on target biology to find something accessible.

The emergence of receptor-mediated transcytosis (RMT) as a BBB delivery strategy represented a genuine step forward. Pioneered clinically by approaches targeting TfR1 and CD98hc, RMT exploits the brain’s own endocytic transport machinery to carry therapeutic cargo across the BBB endothelium. Roche, Denali, and others have invested heavily in this paradigm, and early clinical data are encouraging. But the fundamental constraints of these approaches are becoming clearer: haematotoxicity arising from high peripheral expression of TfR1, receptor saturation by endogenous transferrin, inefficient endosomal tubule sorting leading to lysosomal degradation of cargo, and receptor downregulation under sustained high-affinity engagement. These are not engineering imperfections that can be tuned away - they are intrinsic consequences of repurposing receptors whose primary biological function is not transcytosis.

Much of the underlying biology that governs whether cargo successfully reaches the brain parenchyma, rather than being degraded en route, remains a relatively unexplored design space - distinct from the well-trodden ground around TfR1 and CD98hc. And beyond transcytosis, other constraints persist across the field: a large proportion of CNS-penetrant small molecules remain excluded by efflux mechanisms, and several major therapeutic modalities still lack safe, efficient, and broadly applicable delivery platforms into the brain. We believe there is a compelling scientific and commercial opportunity to redesign BBB drug delivery from first principles, rather than optimise within the constraints of existing approaches.

Working in Partnership with Medicines Discovery Catapult: This role sits within a formal partnership between Deep Science Ventures (DSV) and Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC). Driven by a shared conviction in the urgent need to unlock CNS drug delivery, DSV and MDC have partnered to scope and create a new venture at the intersection of protein engineering, cell biology, and drug development. MDC’s deep domain expertise, translational infrastructure, and network of KOLs, CROs, and pharma relationships will provide the Founder with unparalleled scientific access and a strong route to early validation and partnerships.

The Role: You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a Founder-in-Residence and work closely with the DSV and MDC teams to spin out the new company. During the programme you will refine, improve and complement existing scoping work on:

• The technical thesis for approaches that dramatically improve the efficiency, safety, and modality breadth of drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier;
• IP strategy, differentiation, competition;
• Market, value capture, techno-economics (value proposition);
• Regulatory strategy & positioning;
• Fundraising strategy & pitching;
• Optimising company strategy for the most rapid and de-risked path to Series A.

Preparation for Investment Committee (IC) will involve fulfilling our investment criteria, recruiting advisory and co-founding team members, and parallel fundraising for additional expansion funds. Assuming success at IC, you will receive pre-seed investment and spin out the company end of 2027. You and your co-founders will own a significant stake in the business and continue receiving support post-spinout.

Requirements:

We are interested in a variety of technical backgrounds. The most important requirement is deep expertise in at least two of the following four areas:

• Protein Engineering: Experience leading protein engineering strategy, protein design, structural analysis, and sequence motif analysis; Lead generation campaigns, screening cascades, computational modelling & AI/ML tools; Antibody lead generation (in silico or immunisation) & optimisation; Synthetic biology: mini proteins, cell-penetrating peptides, endosomal escape peptides, membrane insertion peptides.
• Biologics Drug Development: Experience across diverse modalities: bispecific antibodies, protein fusions, antibody conjugates, Fc engineering, synthetic proteins, macrocyclic peptides; Discovery & pre-clinical development (target ID, target validation, lead generation, lead optimisation, DC, IND); Developability (PK/PD, ADME, Toxicology, CMC); In vitro and in vivo pharmacology and study design for protein biologics.
• Cell Biology & Neurobiology: Intracellular trafficking, endocytosis, adaptor proteins, endosomal sorting, tubule formation, kinesin transport; Blood-brain barrier biology, endothelial cell biology, transcytosis, receptor-mediated transcytosis (RMT), carrier-mediated transcytosis (CMT); CNS disease biology (AD, PD, MS, and other neurological conditions); Human BBB translational models (e.g. in vitro iPSC-derived BBB models).
• Medicinal Chemistry: Small molecule conjugates, cleavable linkers, molecular glues, degraders; Experience in CNS-penetrant small molecule design and efflux transporter biology.

Track record of translating scientific concepts from discovery through to in vivo proof-of-concept or IND; Experience managing CRO/CDMO or Pharma programmes and building regulator- or investor-ready data packages; You are highly motivated by unsolved challenges in CNS drug delivery, and driven to challenge the status quo of how we treat brain diseases; You are impact driven, take the initiative, make things happen, and can think from a first principles perspective to figure out what’s really needed; You have clear entrepreneurial spirit and mindset, demonstrated through impactful innovation, and an ability to work in ambiguous, unstructured but fast-paced, demanding and pressurised environments; Collaborative nature, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams.

CNS preclinical or clinical drug development experience; Single-cell transcriptomic data analysis; Target & biomarker identification; Deep understanding of IP - FTO and patentability, with a track record of patents in this field; Track record of publications and/or thought leadership in CNS delivery or related fields; Previous biotech founder or C-suite leadership experience; Previous fundraising experience (VC, dilutive or non-dilutive); Experience building and leading successful scientific or cross-functional teams; Network across CNS pharma, biotech, or relevant academic institutions.

Benefits: By joining DSV, you’ll be joining a team of operators who have founded companies and led translation of science at some of the most respected universities, charities, funds and government agencies. 2/3 of the team have founded or led a company at C-suite and 65% have a PhD. Our team dedicate several hours every week to each Founder or founding team to provide tailored guidance, resources and feedback covering every aspect of what it takes to successfully launch a new venture from both the tech and commercial perspectives:

• We provide optimised, purpose-built, proprietary tools, resources and processes to help create high-impact ventures from scratch, using our venture creation methodology;
• DSV and the Partners’ extensive network, technical, commercial and fundraising domain expertise, and wide-ranging portfolio company capabilities;
• We jointly provide an initial £250k (~$330k / €290k) investment governed by our Investment Committee to incorporate the new venture and develop early proof-of-concept data that is often needed to attract high profile non-venture studio VCs. This funding is also key for obtaining grant funding, which often needs to be matched with private investment;
• You and your co-founder(s) together will own the majority equity stake in the company;
• We provide minimum guaranteed income of £4,166 per month (fixed), paid to each Founder as a consultancy fee until the company is launched and pre-seed investment is secured;
• We provide continuous support post spin-out, including fundraising, commercial partnerships, recruitment and team-building (amongst other things);
• Other Founders currently at DSV across sectors working collaboratively and supporting one another - a unique resource to draw on.

About DSV: Deep Science Ventures (DSV) is on a mission to create a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive. We use our unique venture creation process to create, spin-out, and invest in science companies, combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures. Operating in four sectors - Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture, and Computation - we tackle the challenges defining these areas by taking a first principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.