Most people who advise on pharmaceutical R&D have done one job in it. I’ve done two, back to back, inside the same discovery organization — and the second one only makes sense in light of the first.
Nineteen years at the bench
I joined drug discovery as a medicinal chemist and started where programs start: at screening and formal hit assessment. For the first decade that was the work — running hit assessments across a range of projects, taking screening output through to hit declaration, and learning to tell a real series from a distraction.
From there the work moved into lead optimization, the long multi-parameter push where a series either becomes a candidate or doesn’t. Over those years I contributed to multiple programs at various stages of discovery and across multiple therapeutic areas, and I’m a co-inventor on issued patents from that work.
One program I carried personally, from formal hit assessment all the way through candidate selection. The molecule that came out of it successfully completed Phase 1 and is advancing toward Phase 2. I don’t name the target or the compound here — it’s identifiable from the public patent record, and that’s exactly how a biotech CEO first found me.
Three years on the other side of the table
For the final three years I moved into the IT organization that supports discovery science, as a Business Relationship Manager — the point of contact between Research IT and the scientific functions it served.
The clearest example of the role: I was an integral part of the team that enabled internal development of a federated query engine, the capability that let scientists pull together everything collected on a given molecule on the fly. My part in that was translation — turning what the scientists actually needed into terms the IT team could design and build against. I didn’t write the code or build the system.
Alongside that, I worked with scientific functions through the annual IT business planning and budgeting cycle, helping them make the case for the budget behind their goals, and I kept a steady line of communication open year-round between IT and business partners on progress and delays. That was a communication role — keeping people informed so scientific timelines were protected — not project management.
Why Clarke Discovery Bridge
Those two vantage points don’t add up to one service. They add up to one credential: a long, firsthand view of how small-molecule discovery actually gets done, and of the seam where science and IT meet. Clarke Discovery Bridge offers each of them on its own — medicinal chemistry consulting, and science–IT partnership consulting — to the people who need one or the other.