Market Product Lead

The role

You will own the peptide and protein platform as a commercial product: the market analysis behind it, the target product profiles it is judged against, the decisions about what we build and license first, the go to market strategy and the positioning that partners hear. You will sit between our model and science teams and our business development function, and you will be accountable for the peptide portfolio having a defined buyer, a defensible claim and a credible price.

Key responsibilities

Market and competitive intelligence

• Build and maintain a rigorous view of the peptide/protein therapeutics landscape by segment, indication and modality, mechanism trends and delivery technologies.
• Track and interpret competitor activity across AI-enabled discovery platforms, peptide/protein-focused biotechs, screening technology providers, and internal pharmaceutical capability, and translate it into implications for our product road map and go to market execution.
• Maintain a live map of deal structures, comparables and valuation benchmarks in platform licensing and co-development, and advise on where our agreements should sit.
• Bring the outside in: run structured voice-of-customer work with pharmaceutical R&D leaders, and turn it into prioritised, written requirements rather than anecdotes.

Target product profiles and programme definition

• Author and defend target product profiles for internal programmes, specifying which properties are differentiated in the market and define evidence needs.
• Translate partner-supplied target product profiles into feasible research plans in collaboration with scientific leadership, including honest assessments of what our platform can and cannot address today.
• Define stage gates and go or no-go criteria for peptide programmes, and make the recommendation when a programme should stop.

Productization and roadmap

• Decide, on evidence, which platform capabilities become licensable products and in what sequence, balancing near-term revenue against durable differentiation.
• Own the peptide/product product roadmap end to end, agreeing priorities with model, data and science teams and holding the line on scope.
• Define packaging and commercial models for each offering, including access arrangements, bespoke model fine-tuning on partner data, co-development structures and asset-level licensing.
• Specify the data we need from partners in order to improve, and turn broad offers of collaboration into precise, written requests.

Positioning, evidence and partner engagement

• Responsible for partner engagement and revenue generation in collaboration with the Business Development team.
• Build the peptide narrative and the materials behind it: capability maps, benchmark summaries, validation packages and competitive comparisons that hold up under scrutiny from senior pharmaceutical scientists.
• Set and enforce the standard for external claims, ensuring that what we say about validation, benchmarks and limitations is accurate, consistent across documents, and appropriately caveated.
• Support business development through partner meetings, scientific exchanges, conferences and diligence processes, acting as the credible bridge between technical and commercial conversations.
• Work with scientific and legal colleagues on intellectual property strategy, freedom-to-operate considerations and novelty positioning for designed molecules.

Essential experience and skills

• Ten or more years in the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry, with substantial exposure to peptide, protein or biologics therapeutics in discovery, development, product strategy or business development.
• Demonstrable command of what makes peptides difficult as drugs: proteolytic stability, oral and systemic exposure, receptor selectivity and off-target risk, immunogenicity, formulation and manufacturability, and the trade-offs between them.
• A track record of shaping and closing commercial partnerships, licensing agreements or platform deals with pharmaceutical companies, or of owning commercial strategy for a platform sold into pharmaceutical R&D.
• Proven ability to author target product profiles, competitive assessments and commercial cases that senior stakeholders act on.
• Credibility in both directions: able to hold a substantive technical discussion with computational and experimental scientists, and a commercial discussion with a vice-president of platform technologies, without over-claiming in either.
• Comfort operating with incomplete evidence, and the discipline to distinguish clearly between what is validated, what is promising and what is aspiration.
• Excellent written English. A great deal of this role is producing documents that must be right.
• Travel including to represent Basecamp Research at clients and industry meetings

Desirable experience

• Experience in metabolic disease, immunology, anti-infectives or another therapeutic area with an active peptide pipeline.
• Familiarity with macrocyclic peptides, peptidomimetics, non-canonical amino acids, conjugation strategies or oral delivery technologies.
• Direct experience of AI-enabled drug discovery platforms, from either the platform side or the pharmaceutical side of a partnership.
• A postgraduate degree in a life science, chemistry or a related business areas, or equivalent depth acquired in industry