Deep Science Ventures is a decentralised, global venture creator. We create companies, including IP and founding teams, in-house, from scratch across 4 sectors - Pharmaceuticals, Agriculture, Climate and Computation - partnering with the world’s most ambitious organisations to achieve critical societal outcomes.

In the Pharma sector, we're creating and supporting ventures to cure diseases using emerging combinatorial techniques (more about our work in pharma here) and as a Senior Associate you'll be responsible for driving the venture creation work end-to-end, from scoping new opportunity areas to recruiting and onboarding Founders in Residence to managing new venture projects pre-spinout.

The role is full-time, starting asap, either fully remote or hybrid.

About the role in more detail

We work across a broad range of opportunity areas (OAs) for venture creation in curative therapeutics. We currently have several venture projects and Founders in Residence (pre-spinout) managed by the Pharma team across cystic fibrosis, cell therapy manufacturing, solid tumour immunotherapy, neurofibromatosis, inflammatory disease and paediatric oncology, and several other opportunity areas lined up for future venture creation programmes, including Parkinson's disease and cardiovascular disease.

As a Senior Associate you'll be responsible for scientific research and analysis across multiple of these and future opportunity areas (on average 3 OAs at the same time), hence keen interest and relevant technical depth (at least a PhD), and breadth in applicable scientific disciplines is a must have to do well in the role.

Beyond scientific research, you'll also be responsible for Founder in Residence recruitment for the OAs you're working on, hence strong communication skills, high degree of empathy and networking skills are important.

Finally, you'll be working directly with the founding teams hired for each OA to manage the technical and commercial de-risking prior to spin-out, including:

• Tech landscape mapping and market opportunity analysis;
• Ideation and tech concept development, including IP protection strategy;
• Team building, including co-founder and advisor recruitment;
• Customer development, commercial partnerships and business model strategy;
• Proof-of-concept experiment design and technology scale-up strategy;
• Financial planning and fundraising from both grants and private investors;
• Company incorporation.

While you may not have previous experience across all aspects of pre-seed venture creation process, familiarity with early-stage science commercialisation process particularly in biotech/therapeutics is a must have. You'll have at least two of the following:

• IP: demonstrable knowledge of how the IP strategy fits into the overall commercial strategy, including conducting relevant IP landscape analysis;
• VC fundraising: demonstrable knowledge of venture investment dynamics, what investors look for in seed and series A, and ability to link that with venture development milestones;
• Regs: demonstrable knowledge or regulatory frameworks applicable to the different stages of the commercialisation process (e.g. clinical trials phase 1 through to phase 3);
• Value chain in Pharma: demonstrable knowledge of the different stakeholders across the value chain and how to tailor the value proposition to each.

Requirements

• Deep technical understanding and interest in (at least two) relevant opportunity areas, preferably Parkinson's and cardiovascular disease, combined with an understanding of the commercial and business landscape of these areas;
• PhD (ideally, translationally-focussed) in any of (or similar) areas: cell and gene therapy, neuroscience drug discovery, computational biology, molecular biology, biochemistry;
• Experience in compiling competitive intelligence for novel therapeutics, including thorough assessment of the commercial landscape, unmet needs, and market positioning;
• Demonstrated interest in commercial / business / VC fields, with 5+ years of experience working in life sciences/biotech;
• Demonstrable knowledge in at least two of: IP, VC fundraising, regs, value chain in Pharma;
• Solid knowledge of the patenting process with the ability to analyse freedom-to-operate and patentability for new technologies is a strong plus;
• Previous experience in business development/strategic partnerships is a plus.

Benefits

• Our Team
• Working with some of the most ambitious and impact-driven individuals you'll ever meet;
• Being part of building global scalable businesses solving for human and planetary outcomes;
• Rapid personal development and massive learning curve;
• £71k baseline salary + bonus scheme + employee options scheme;
• Flexible working environment (remote or hybrid);
• & other perks :)