Senior Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry

Pharmaron is a global CRO helping pharma and biotech companies bring new therapies to life. With over 25,000 employees worldwide across 23 locations in the US, UK and China, we support drug discovery through to manufacturing with fully integrated, high-quality services.

We’re proud of the impact we make and just last year, we supported over 780 discovery projects
, 1,000+ CMC programmes
, and 1,000+ clinical trials across all phases. Our teams are involved in everything from small molecules, biologics and gene therapies, and we work with more than 3,000 global customers
. To learn more, visit

We have a new opportunity for a Senior Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry to join the Integrated Drug Discovery (IDD) Services group at our Hoddesdon site. In this role you will provide medicinal chemistry and theoretical synthetic expertise to the drug discovery project portfolio. This includes the design, review, assessment and recommendation of suitable synthetic routes for small molecule projects, plus support to medicinal chemistry designs and project logistics.

The Integrated Drug Discovery (IDD) Services group at Pharmaron is responsible for leading and delivering drug discovery projects for our client partners. The team comprises scientific expertise and strategic leadership across medicinal chemistry, CADD, biology, DMPK and translational science. Combined with Pharmaron’s global research capabilities we design and deliver integrated programmes from target identification and hit finding through to IND filing.

Working closely with our partners we define strategy, coordinate execution across teams and with an AI enabled accelerated Design–Make–Test–Analyse cycle support the progression of projects and innovative medicines towards the clinic.

• Work with UK medicinal chemistry project leader(s) to begin providing design ideas, review and collate recent data, conduct SAR analysis and support project logistics.
• Effectively communicate and collaborate with cross-functional project groups to ensure that scientific work is appropriately documented in the production of reports, manuscripts, and presentations.
• Establish excellent working relationships with the various chemistry teams in China and with the client, as appropriate. Attend client/China chemistry, and where appropriate project team, meetings, record and ensure delivery of the required project tasks.
• Work at the interface of the sponsor and the China chemistry teams to effectively manage/optimise the synthetic chemistry productivity.
• Manage the synthetic chemistry of multiple projects, review weekly chemistry reports, propose novel routes for challenging targets, review analytical data to consolidate data integrity.
• Organise and actively participate in brainstorming sessions to solve synthetic problems of moderate/high complexity for assigned projects with moderate guidance from a scientific supervisor.
• Maintain a high level of knowledge in synthetic chemistry by reviewing the latest relevant literature.
• Increase knowledge of medicinal chemistry to allow greater contribution to compound design over time.
• When required, work with the chemistry teams to provide patent write-ups for the projects. Compile and review the experimental section of the patent application to the sponsor’s desired format.
• Support the writing of scientific papers of the projects when required.
• Contribute to ongoing novel platforms or other capability development work

• PhD in Chemistry or Medicinal Chemistry, or equivalent industrial experience.
• Prior synthetic chemistry experience in a laboratory having demonstrated multi-step synthesis, purification and characterisation of compounds.
• Experi…