Jobs in Contract Research: Medicinal Chemistry

I recently discovered a blog by a medicinal chemist who has shared some interesting career insights.  Medicinal chemistry, or pharmaceutical chemistry, is the discipline of designing and synthesizing new drugs, and it can be a very interesting career pathway for chemists looking for a job in the pharma or biotech sector.

In his post “Life with a Drug Discovery CRO“, the author describes what it was like to work for a contract research organization that specialized in combinatorial chemistry, synthesis, scale up and process development on behalf of big pharma clients.

How it worked for us in med chem was we would be presented with a project (in varying detail and with varying amount of leeway in our allotted tasks) with some fixed length of contract. Most were annually renewable and many continued for multiple years. The customers in question were a mix of pharma and start-up: for the established players, we were outsourcing for a project they did not have the internal capacity for (usually because there were more pressing projects and/or synthetic challenges to overcome). For the start-ups, we were their chemistry department.


Posted: June 6th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Preclinical R&D | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »


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