Careers for 2003 and Beyond: Medicinal Chemistry (from C&EN, June 23, 2003)
From Chemical and Engineering News, April 2, 2001, Volume 79, pp. 77,82,88
"As long as we're committed to creating products that are useful for human disease and those products are small synthetics, we will always have a demand for skilled synthetic, medicinal, computational, and combinatorial chemists."
Amgen especially looks for people with industrial experience. "There's an emphasis on medicinal chemistry experience rather than just organic chemistry," he says. The company looks for people "who understand what a drug is rather than just what a molecule is. You don't find those people all the time, so we have to mix that with people straight out of good schools who have a capacity to learn," Lydon says.
Anadys has been successful in recruiting outstanding chemists because the company doesn't use chemistry as an "accessory," Xanthopoulos says. "We built the company with the focus on medicinal chemistry, not combinatorial, because we see a paradigm shift from combinatorial chemistry to information-driven medicinal chemistry." He believes that real value for Anadys is not in generating huge numbers of molecules but in rapidly designing and preparing structures based on meaningful information.
Bachelor's- and master's-level chemists are eagerly sought by biotech firms. "B.S. and M.S. people have always been an extraordinarily valuable commodity," says 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals' Sa-lemme. "We recruit aggressively for those. In the industry, they are highly regarded and well compensated." Gilead's Lee adds: "B.S./M.S. people are surprisingly difficult to hire in this area, especially synthetic organic chemists."
From Chemical and Engineering News, November 13, 2000, Volume 78, p.37
"The market for Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. chemists in synthetic and medicinal chemistry is high, with starting salaries continuing their steady increase over previous years,"