Consultant, Translational Computational Drug Discovery

About the Engagement

VivaMed is seeking a consultant with strong drug discovery judgment and computational fluency to help evaluate AI-assisted therapeutic hypotheses before they advance to external validation, CRO review, or deeper development planning.

This role is focused on scientific pressure-testing, translational screening, and evidence-bounded

triage. The consultant will help determine whether a therapeutic hypothesis has a credible mechanism

of action, disease-biology rationale, translational path, and practical development logic.

This is not a pure coding role, and it is not a narrow academic bioinformatics role. The ideal consultant

understands how therapeutic hypotheses move from biological rationale to translational feasibility,

experimental validation, clinical feasibility, and development decision-making.

Core Mission

The consultant will help VivaMed distinguish promising AI-assisted therapeutic hypotheses from those

that require additional clarification, deeper validation, or deprioritization. The role sits between AI-

assisted hypothesis generation and external validation planning.

The consultant will support a structured hypothesis triage and project prioritization workflow, helping

selected hypotheses progress toward actionable, de-risked project concepts suitable for validation

planning, external expert review, CRO engagement, and clinical feasibility assessment.

Key Responsibilities
• Scientifically review AI-assisted therapeutic hypotheses across multiple program categories,

including drug repurposing, combination therapy, biomarker-defined rescue, selected

formulation or delivery concepts, and selected biologic or biobetter concepts.
• Assess mechanism-of-action plausibility, disease-biology fit, target-indication rationale, and

translational relevance.
• Identify speculative, weakly supported, redundant, or non-actionable hypotheses before external

escalation.
• Evaluate whether available literature, human genetics, expression data, clinical precedent,

pharmacology, disease biology, and prior development history support the proposed therapeutic

rationale.
• Review drug repurposing and indication-expansion opportunities for biological plausibility,

clinical relevance, and development feasibility.
• Assess combination therapy concepts for mechanistic complementarity, redundancy, toxicity

overlap, dose and schedule feasibility, and translational logic.
• Support biomarker-defined rescue or CDx-related hypotheses by evaluating whether the

biomarker is mechanistically linked, clinically actionable, and suitable for patient stratification.
• Consider prior clinical data, real-world evidence, label context, and 505(b)(2)-relevant

development logic where applicable.
• Help define advance, hold, or shelve recommendations with explicit scientific rationale.
• Contribute to standardized triage templates, evidence summaries, and decision-ready scientific

rationale packages.
• Collaborate with internal scientific, business, computational, and CRO-facing stakeholders.
• Help improve the scientific quality of VivaMed's AI-assisted pipeline without creating

unnecessary complexity or over-reliance on speculative computational outputs.

Relevant Program Areas

The consultant may support hypotheses across:
• CNS and neuropsychiatric disorders
• Pain and addiction
• Cardiometabolic and metabolic-inflammatory disease
• Rare disease
• Selective immuno-oncology or immunology
• Drug repurposing and indication expansion
• Combination therapy
• Biomarker-defined rescue or precision-medicine concepts
• Selected formulation, route, or biologic concepts where translational review is needed

Expected Outputs

Typical deliverables may include:
• Scientific triage memos
• Mechanism-of-action and disease-biology reality checks
• Drug repurposing plausibility assessments
• Combination rationale and risk summaries
• Biomarker-defined rescue assessments
• Advance, hold, or shelve recommendations
• Evidence-gap and kill-criteria summaries
• Clinical feasibility and development-path considerations
• Validation-planning rationale for internal or CRO-facing review
• Recommendations for additional computational, literature, real-world evidence, or experimental

validation.

Required Qualifications
• PhD, MD/PhD, PharmD with substantial drug discovery or translational research experience, or

MS with significant pharma-facing experience, preferably 15+ years, in a relevant field such as

translational medicine, pharmacology, computational biology, systems biology, drug discovery,

molecular medicine, or a related discipline.
• Experience in biotech, pharma, translational research, or drug discovery decision-making.
• Strong ability to evaluate therapeutic hypotheses using mechanism, disease biology,

pharmacology, clinical precedent, prior development history, and translational evidence.
• Ability to work across therapeutic areas and integrate multiple forms of evidence.
• Computational fluency sufficient to interpret biological datasets, pathway analyses,

pharmacology resources, literature-derived evidence, clinical-trial data, and AI-assisted outputs.
• Strong scientific writing skills and ability to produce decision-ready recommendations.
• Ability to communicate clearly with both scientific and non-scientific stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience with drug repurposing, combination therapy, translational pharmacology, precision

medicine, rare disease, CNS, cardiometabolic disease, immunology, or oncology.
• Familiarity with public biomedical databases, pathway and network biology resources, clinical-

trial databases, drug labels, disease biology datasets, pharmacology resources, and real-world

evidence sources.
• Experience contributing to early-stage portfolio triage, asset diligence, preclinical strategy,

clinical feasibility review, or CRO-facing validation plans.
• Ability to identify not only why a hypothesis might work, but also why it may fail.
• Experience preparing go/no-go recommendations, evidence reviews, scientific diligence

documents, or translational development assessments.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a software engineering role, a generic AI/ML role, or a narrow omics-analysis role. The

consultant must be able to apply drug discovery judgment, not simply run analyses.

Candidates who are highly technical but unable to evaluate therapeutic plausibility, translational feasibility, clinical relevance, or development logic are unlikely to be the right fit.

Engagement Structure

This is initially envisioned as a consultant or fractional expert engagement. Scope, time commitment,

and deliverables may be structured around defined hypothesis-review batches, specific program

categories, therapeutic-area reviews, or a recurring advisory model.

Translational Computational Drug Discovery: $80–$120/hour