Senior Scientist I, Medicinal Chemistry

About the role

Working with the existing members of the Chemistry Department and various UK and overseas Contract Research Organizations (CROs), the successful applicant will support medicinal chemistry projects and coordinate synthetic chemistry activities to ensure the delivery of high-quality small molecule development candidates within competitive timeframes, while safeguarding the Company’s intellectual property by advancing its patent estate. This is a remote, desk-based role and does not involve wet work. May include occasional F2F meetings in the London to Cambridge corridor.

Main responsibilities

• Efficient support of management of remote teams of medicinal and synthetic chemists at CROs.
• Integrate and analyse project biology and DMPK data to enable successful hit-to-lead and lead optimisation campaigns through rational molecular design.
• Timely upload of project data to company database and recording in ELN.
• Support patent filings with experimental write up and data checking.
• Work collaboratively within the Company’s project teams, with colleagues in biology, biophysics and computational sciences and with external collaborators such that objectives are met in a timely manner.
• Communicate effectively, interpret and summarize complex data for presentation to different audiences.
• Prioritise work according to project goals and take responsibility for the timely delivery of objectives.
• Keep up to date with state-of-the-art technologies and knowledge of developments in medicinal chemistry.

Essential Requirements:

• Education (PhD or MSc) in organic chemistry or medicinal chemistry with a strong track record of delivery and a breadth/depth of experience in an industrial drug discovery environment.
• 3-5 years drug discovery experience.
• Good knowledge of synthetic and medicinal chemistry.
• Managing remote teams of medicinal and synthetic chemists at Contract Research Organisations.
• Solid understanding of biological signalling pathways, structure-based drug design and ADME optimisation in drug discovery.
• Experience in preclinical drug discovery processes including hit identification, hit-to-lead and lead optimisation, to the delivery of development candidates.

Nice to have:

• Proficient in analysing and interpreting data from biophysical assays.
• Familiarity with data visualisation software (e.g., StarDrop, Spotfire, Vortex, DataWarrior).
• Experienced in many elements of preclinical drug discovery process from target selection and hit identification, through hit-to-lead and lead optimisation, to the delivery of development candidates across multiple programmes.
• Experience of assessing the patent landscape around a target.
• Eagerness to develop leadership skills.
• Understanding of cheminformatics and/or modelling software (e.g. PyMol, KNIME, Torx) and ability to use ML tools to predict assay endpoints.
• Strong publication record in peer-reviewed journals and a track record of presenting at scientific conferences.

All applicants should be able to demonstrate the right to work in the UK.