Product Lead, Peptide Therapeutics

Required

• 10+years in the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry, with substantial exposure to peptide, protein or biologics therapeutics in discovery, development, product strategy or business development.
• Demonstrable command of what makes peptides difficult as drugs: proteolytic stability, oral and systemic exposure, receptor selectivity and off-target risk, immunogenicity, formulation and manufacturability, and the trade-offs between them.
• A track record of shaping and closing partnerships, licensing agreements or platform deals with pharmaceutical companies, or of owning commercial strategy for a platform sold into pharmaceutical R&D.
• Proven ability to author target product profiles, competitive assessments and commercial cases that senior stakeholders act on.
• Credibility in both directions: able to hold a substantive technical discussion with computational and experimental scientists, and a commercial discussion with a vice-president of platform technologies, without over-claiming in either.
• Comfort operating with incomplete evidence, and the discipline to distinguish clearly between what is validated, what is promising and what is aspiration.
• Excellent written English. A great deal of this role is producing documents that must be right.
• Willingness to travel internationally, typically once or twice a month.
• Advantageous Skills and Experience
• Experience in metabolic disease, immunology, anti-infectives or another therapeutic area with an active peptide pipeline.
• Familiarity with macrocyclic peptides, peptidomimetics, non-canonical amino acids, conjugation strategies or oral delivery technologies.
• Direct experience of AI-enabled drug discovery platforms, from either the platform side or the pharmaceutical side of a partnership.