Sr. Scientist-Director/Medicinal Chemistry

The candidate will play a significant role in the establishment of the in-house chemistry laboratory and in generation of lead compounds for medicinal chemistry programs. Qualified individual must be proficient in identifying structure activity relationships (SAR), selectivity profiles, pharmacokinetics and in vivo efficacy. Individual will also help identify outsourcing opportunities for various phases of chemistry and DMPK.

Job Requirements
We are seeking a strong medicinal chemist with a PhD and 8-10 years of experience, including target validation, cancer-related drug development stngly preferred. This is a small company and this position will be critical in the development of the team.

Mission
The company seeks to become the premier chromatin therapeutics company through the discovery and development of novel drugs targeting selective regulators of epigenetic function. An initial focus will be the development of new cancer therapies through the discovery of inhibitors targeting histone post translational modifications (PTMs) and their function.

Cancer is a disease of many cellular abnormalities that collectively confer a heritable and selectable advantage for cells to proliferate. Unfortunately, an inherent challenge of developing effective cancer therapeutics lies with the difficulty of accurately discerning those select targets that are essential for cancer cell survival from the multitude of gene expression alterations whose abnormal expression correlates with, but does not cause, the cancer phenotype. An effective strategy for validating "causal" targets for drug development is to focus on tumor-associated specific and recurrent genomic alterations such as DNA mutations, chromosomal translocations, and gene amplifications.