Drug Hunter
Paris /
Drug hunter /
Full-time (French "CDI")
/ Hybrid
At Aqemia you will work in a multi-disciplinary team of passionate drug hunters, AI engineers and developers who are committed to our mission of finding many drugs, at high pace, to cure diseases.
As part of our growing team, you will enjoy a fast-paced, challenging, science-driven and creative environment, working at the very forefront of AI & Deep physics-powered drug discovery. This is a tremendous opportunity to bring your own impact on changing the way medicines are discovered and be involved in shaping the direction of our fast growing business and team.
We are looking for highly skilled and collaborative individuals who are naturally curious, have a passion for learning and solving complex problems with a “can-do” mindset.
If this sounds exciting to you, come and join us!
The difference you’ll make
Within Aqemia’s drug discovery portfolio team, Drug hunters are the pillars of drug discovery projects, leveraging our unique technology to invent a next generation of drugs.
Objective of such projects is to invent therapeutic molecules (hits / leads) against a given target protein and related disease, leveraging our unique technology combining new Physics and Machine Learning algorithms. Projects can be in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies to invent molecules for their targets, or within Aqemia internal project portfolio.
A project is run by a core team - ie a drug hunter, a project leader, plus part of a Chemist and Biologist - and relies on the technology and ways of working developed by Aqemia platform.
What you'll do
- Design / Generate in the computer small molecules to address a given therapeutic target, starting with drug-target affinity and selectivity, and adding other efficiency & safety properties within Aqemia or in collaboration with Pharma partners based on technology from Aqemia’s platform, experimental results from the project and literature from the project
- Communicate in a concise and written way your hypotheses and work plan, so that they can be discussed and improved, incl. code with attention to robustness and reproducibility
- Apply and test the baseline technology and ways of working developed by Aqemia’s platform: generative AI algorithms to invent molecules, properties prediction models, molecular dynamic techniques, …
- Give systematic feedback to Aqemia’s technology platform in a structured and constructive way, based on your experience and project experimental results
- Propose new ideas to advance the project and improve Aqemia’s technology to make it more precise, fast, scalable
- Discuss Chemistry plan with CROs to optimize predictions of properties and ease of synthesis and test
- Work hand-in-hand with Aqemia’s interdisciplinary team beyond your project team, incl. Machine Learning engineers, software engineers, computational chemists and theoretical physicists
- Mentor more junior drug hunters
Your profile
- You have Ph.D. and post-doctoral experience as well as a track record of technical excellence as shown by peer reviewed publications
- Inventorship status on patents is a great nice to have
- You have 3+ years of pharma/biotech/CRO experience with a focus on computational chemistry or computational biology
- You have hands-on experience in computational chemistry applied to drug discovery using state-of-the-art structure-based or ligand-based methods, including techniques such as virtual screening, molecular docking, structure-activity relationship analysis, multi-property optimization-based compound design
- You have extensive knowledge of protein structures, functions and protein-ligand interactions
- You have knowledge of computational chemistry packages: RDKIT, OpenMM, parmed, GROMACS, Ambertools, MDAnalysis, …
- You have proficiency in small molecule ligand discovery (esp. SBDD) and cheminformatics techniques including protein homology modeling, small molecule docking and pharmacophore hypothesis, in silico virtual screening, QSAR and ADMET properties modeling, database searches, combinatorial library design, FEP based affinity predictions, molecular dynamics simulations, etc.
- You are an object-oriented programmer coder who’s comfortable with object-oriented programming in Linux/UNIX environments.
- Intermediate to advanced python programming
Who you are
- You are eager to play an active role in contributing to Aqemia’s strategy to develop drugs for patients.
- You are anxious to bring your wealth of knowledge and skills to the table to inspire and coach brilliant people from diverse backgrounds.
- You are keen to solve tough problems on issues that truly matter.
- You are inquisitive, and proactive with a can-do attitude.
- You are excited to join a small team and make your mark on drug discovery.
- You thrive on working collaboratively in a fast-paced, interdisciplinary environment that keeps everyone on track.
Our Workplace Environment
• Fast-paced, intellectually and scientifically demanding, results-driven.
• Our Founders boast : 10+ years experience in research at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, not to mention a stint in Oxford and Cambridge / 10+ years experience in strategy consulting at BCG.
• Aqemia has a rapidly growing team of +50 people from world-class institutions (AstraZeneca, GSK, Sanofi, Harvard, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole Polytechnique, BCG)
• Our premises are conveniently located in the center of Paris (1 Bd Pasteur), with a possibility of up to 2 days of remote work.
• We are part of the French Tech 2030 program (https://lafrenchtech.com/fr/la-france-aide-les-startup/french-tech-2030/).
• Working language: English
We are growing fast, if you feel that you don't fit this job description but you’re still excited to join, then please get in touch!
Aqemia is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, disability status or any other basis under applicable law.
