Head of Biology
About the role
Senior scientific strategy leadership role at Parallel Bio responsible for directing the company’s biological roadmap, prioritizing therapeutic areas, and shaping how the platform generates real human biological data for drug discovery.
Responsibilities
- Aim the engine. Own the prioritization of therapeutic areas, indications, and targets. Build the scientific roadmap that shapes what every other team works on.
- Direct disease modeling with the R&D team. Determine which diseases get modeled, what those models need to look like, how they need to perform, and what readouts prove they are working.
- Validate the science with the Platform team. As autonomous workcells come online, make sure the data makes biological sense and answers the right questions.
- Pick the targets with the AI/ML team. Decide which disease targets our foundation models get pointed at, and serve as the scientific lead on benchmarking and validating model output.
- Partner closely with Business Development. Identify collaboration and partnership opportunities, shape how the platform is positioned commercially, build BD decks and marketing materials, and prioritize indications and targets with strongest commercial leverage.
- Drive in-licensing of drug assets. Ensure strong platform-drug fit with proof points that turn the platform from a data engine into a drug discovery engine.
- Build the public scientific narrative. Lead the strategy behind patents, publications, white papers, blog posts, conference talks, and external signals that establish Parallel Bio as a scientific authority.
- Decide our internal drug discovery programs. As the platform matures, choose which diseases we pursue ourselves.
Qualifications
- An acknowledged leader in human immunology. PhD in a related biomedical or bioengineering field with credible experience across sub-fields of immunology (e.g., cancer, autoimmunity, infectious disease, allergy) and broad knowledge across innate and adaptive immunity.
- Scientific communicator capable of writing papers, giving talks, drafting patent strategies, and briefing a CEO with fluency.
Skills
About Parallel Bio
Using the immune system to cure disease
Parallel Bio created a human 'immune system in a dish' to discover drugs and immunotherapies more likely to work in patients. Our platform has all of the same elements as a human immune system, meaning you can test drugs and vaccines as if you were testing them in actual patients from the start. The biggest reason why 95% of new drugs fail is that they were tested in mice - but with our human platform, pharma companies will know which drugs will successfully treat patients, speeding up the process and reducing the cost. To date our platform has successfully been used to test 12 drugs, and vaccines against 8 different diseases. The company is founded by Robert DiFazio, a former Stanford R&D director with a PhD in immunology, and Juliana Hilliard, a former System1 Biosciences R&D lead with an MSc in bioengineering, both of whom have led drug discovery programs for years.
More open roles at Parallel Bio
- Corporate Program Manager, Firmwide3w agoHybrid (New York, NY) · Operations
- IT/OT Specialist3w agoSan Francisco, CA, Brisbane, CA · Operations
- Head of Platform Bioengineering & Assay Development4w agoHybrid (San Francisco, CA) · Engineering / Bioengineering
- Research Associate, Vienna4w agoVienna · Science, Biotechnology
- 4w ago