Medicinal Chemist

Job title: Senior / Principal Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry

Location: Central Cambridge

Salary range: Competitive salary.  Eligible for company-wide discretionary annual bonus plan.

Job summary: Wren Therapeutics Limited is seeking to appoint a talented senior or principal medicinal chemist to join its rapidly growing scientific team. The appointee will play a key role in leading and advancing drug discovery research projects, together with other members of the team, and be expected to make substantial contributions to the discovery and characterisation of new therapeutic compounds. This is a non laboratory based role. The successful candidate will have a desire to play a role in discovering new treatments for debilitating diseases, while working in an innovative and fast-paced small company environment.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and independently manage all medicinal chemistry activities for one or more drug discovery projects.
• Manage external academic, industry and CRO relationships.
• Communicate complex ideas and concepts to those with more limited knowledge and understanding as well as to peers.
• Write and contribute to publications, including presentations at academic or industry conferences.

Skills, qualifications and experience needed:

• Minimum undergraduate degree, preferably PhD, in Chemistry or a related discipline.
• Extensive experience in medicinal chemistry and associated methods in the context of small molecule drug discovery, from hit selection through lead optimization and candidate selection.
• Experience in using cheminformatics and molecular modelling software, database searching, data handling and analysis.
• Research or industry experience in the fields of protein misfolding diseases and/or CNS/neurodegeneration would be beneficial (but is not required).
• Evidence of ability to lead, organise and participate in collaborative research projects.
• Evidence of ability to present research findings to a scholarly audience. Developed bibliography of research publications and presentations is desirable.
• Fluency in English. 

Closing date for applications: Applications must be received by 26 August 2019

Application procedure: Please send a cover letter and CV to recruitment@wrentherapeutics.com

About Wren Therapeutics (Wren): Wren (www.wrentherapeutics.com) is a spin-off company from the University of Cambridge (UK) and Lund University (Sweden), focused on drug discovery and development for protein misfolding diseases. Wren is advancing an entirely novel approach to address this class of diseases, based on more than a decade of research from its scientific founders focused on the chemical kinetics of the protein misfolding process. These advances make it possible to map, and selectively modulate, the complex and non-linear chemical kinetic networks associated with misfolding proteins and disease. Wren's predictive, quantitative platform is built on concepts from the physical sciences and is a fundamental shift from the descriptive, qualitative methods of traditional biology, which have failed to successfully address these complex systems. Wren is using its unique approach to develop a broad pipeline of small molecule and antibody therapeutics, as well as diagnostics, spanning neurology, ophthalmology and metabolic diseases.