Vice-President of Biology

Responsibilities:

• Leadership of the discovery biology team to in the development of strategies for internal target discovery and validation, assay development, and screening effort strategies that will drive project medicinal chemistry and deliver key elements of the development candidate project profile.
• Lead and contribute to project teams focused on target selection, target validation, lead generation and lead optimization to enable delivery of novel drug candidates into clinical development.
• Responsible for the enhancement of the company's target and lead discovery platform and the delivery of new therapeutic programs into internal pipeline
• Provide in vitro biology and pharmacology support and collaborate with other drug discovery functions to advance preclinical programs and achieve company milestones
• Collaborate closely with chemistry and ADME pharmacology teams in closed-loop lead optimization campaigns.
• Liaise with external CROs to conduct HTS screening, hit confirmation, SAR exploration, data reporting
• Make intellectual contributions to all stages of the drug discovery process and clearly articulate deliverables, progress, and issues to drug discovery teams
• Effectively communicate with colleagues and stakeholders; create and present research updates and provide strategic input to team/company meetings.
• Plan and execute on resource allocation to achieve project goals and drive results in multiple programs
• Collaborate effectively across the leadership team and other departments and functions to advance research programs expeditiously from discovery to clinical candidate
• Responsible for the group complying with best laboratory safety practices, and maintaining clear, detailed laboratory notebooks
• Establish partnering strategies to leverage external knowledge and capabilities.
• Manage external efforts at CROs

Requirements:

• PhD in Biology or Pharmacology, or equivalent industrial experience
• Minimum 10+ years of relevant experience in the pharmaceutical Industry
• Experience in luminescence based and qPCR assay development, optimization, and high throughput screening in the context of small molecule drug discovery programs
• Broad experience with commonly used assay formats (e.g. luminescence reporter assays, qPCR, ELISA, Western)
• Experience is managing external interactions with CROs.