About this role
At Bristol Myers Squibb, our employees often ask, “Who are you working for?”—a question that fuels collaboration, accountability, and urgency in our work. Our purpose-driven culture inspires us to discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines to prevail over serious diseases. We offer uniquely interesting and meaningful work, opportunities for growth, and a supportive environment that values inclusion, wellbeing, flexibility, and comprehensive benefits.
This is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it.
In Discovery Pharmaceutics, you will impact the lives of patients by working with multidisciplinary research teams to help discover novel, efficacious and safe therapeutics. BMS is looking for a motivated Scientist with a desire to contribute to the fast-paced discovery matrix environment by applying drug delivery concepts and designing formulation strategies to enable desired exposure for potential new small molecule drug candidates in preclinical studies. The ideal candidate will have a good understanding of the physicochemical properties of new chemical entities as they relate to drug delivery, oral absorption, and other routes of administration.
The successful candidate will be expected to apply emerging digital and AI-enabled approaches, where scientifically appropriate, to strengthen candidate assessment, improve experimental design, accelerate data interpretation, and enhance decision-making in discovery pharmaceutics.
Job Responsibilities
- ✓Conduct and interpret preformulation studies on small molecule drug candidates to define physicochemical and biopharmaceutical properties relevant to drug delivery.
- ✓Provide experimental/computational/predictive input to drug discovery scientists during screening of new chemical entities, and enable drug design from lead optimization to the point of candidate identification, characterization and selection
- ✓Strategically design and guide the development of enabling formulations — including amorphous solid dispersions, lipid-based formulations, formulations incorporating permeation enhancers, and others — suitable for use in drug discovery pharmacology, PK, and initial toxicology studies.
- ✓Ability to propose and design novel in vitro methodologies (e.g., modified flux/permeability assays) to evaluate the performance of various formulation types, including enabling formulations and permeation enhancers, is desirable.
- ✓Apply innovative drug delivery technologies and data-driven or AI-enabled approaches, internally and externally, to support more effective delivery of poorly soluble or poorly permeable small molecules.
- ✓Contribute to and help shape the strategic direction of Discovery Pharmaceutics, strengthening its role as a problem-solving partner for discovery teams and enabling seamless transfer of candidates to development.
- ✓Advance the capabilities of the larger candidate optimization organization by developing scientific expertise that strengthens understanding of how physicochemical properties influence overall biopharmaceutical performance, with an emphasis on modeling and simulation.
Job Requirements/Education
- ✓Ph.D. with 0-2 years of experience, or MS with 3+ years of experience, or Bachelors with 5+ years in Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical / Medicinal / Physical / Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Engineering, or a related discipline, or academic equivalent, is required.
- ✓Understanding of preformulation aspects for new chemical entities, along with the ability to guide the generation and interpretation of preformulation laboratory data as it relates to the overall discovery process.
- ✓Familiarity with enabling formulation strategies for poorly soluble or poorly permeable compounds — such as amorphous solid dispersions, lipid-based formulations (e.g., SEDDS/SMEDDS), and permeation enhancers.
- ✓Knowledge on use of computers and databases for data collection, compilation, analysis, and information dissemination is a must.
- ✓Experience with physiologically based biopharmaceutics modeling tools (e.g., GastroPlus) is desired but not essential.
- ✓Experience using computational and AI-enabled tools for experimental planning, data analysis, and literature mining is a plus.
- ✓Effective team player who engages interdisciplinary discovery teams and raises pharmaceutics and developability considerations, in a flexible, global environment.
- ✓Good written and verbal communication skills are a must.
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We hire for skills and capabilities, not just credentials – if this role excites you, but doesn’t perfectly match your resume, we encourage you to apply anyway.
Compensation Overview
San Diego - CA - US: $111,980 - $135,692