Chief Scientific / Medical Officer (Stealth Photonic Bio-sensing Venture)

Job description

What we do We are an early-stage deep-tech photonic bio-sensing company combining silicon photonics, micro-fluidics, and applied AI to bring high-end optical diagnostics out of the central lab and onto a low-cost disposable chip plus a compact reader. The first product is a point-of-care diagnostic addressing a multi-billion dollar clinical market currently served by hand-aligned, six-figure bench-top instruments. The mission Clinical-grade flow cytometry today happens in a central laboratory: a £250K instrument, a trained technician, refrigerated antibody reagents, a four-to-twelve-hour turnaround. About 3.7 billion people on the planet, half of humanity, have no access to that infrastructure. The convergence of silicon photonics, AI design, and disposable micro-fluidics has finally made the alternative viable: a 90-second result for £5 at the point of care. The clinical questions this unlocks, rapid sepsis triage, CD4/CD8 in the field, leukaemia screening at primary care, transplant and cell-therapy monitoring, are worth building a company around. Your role You own the clinical and scientific story end-to-end. Investors, design partners, and clinical collaborators need to hear the biology from someone who has lived it. You decide which biomarkers and clinical questions we go after first, and how the company’s scientific roadmap evolves over years 1, 3, and 5. Responsibilities Scientific narrative: the biomarker → clinical decision story behind every commercial bet, investor pitch, and grant. Clinical and research partnerships: design-partner relationships across haematology, oncology, infectious disease, transplant, and translational research. Assay and panel strategy: which markers we ship first, the rationale a clinician will accept, and the evidence we need to gather to support each claim. Clinical evidence and trial design: working with regulatory consultants to map the path through pre-submission, CLIA-Waiver / IVDR, and pivotal study. Clinical Advisory Board: recruit and chair a small specialist board across the priority therapy areas. Scientific authorship: publications and grant submissions that build biological credibility. Future scientific direction: as the company’s scientific roadmap evolves, you frame the clinical and translational opportunities that justify each step. London-based. Hybrid works well. Fully remote isn’t a fit at this stage, we need to be in the same room when it matters. Your profile MD, PhD, or DPhil in haematology, immunology, clinical pathology, or cancer immunology. 5–10 years industrial experience as CMO/CSO at a diagnostics, cytometry, or cell therapy company or an equivalent translational-research portfolio with at least one prior spinout. Have personally designed multiparameter immunophenotyping panels and seen them translated into a clinical decision someone acted on. Fluent in what an oncologist does with a CTC count, what a haematologist does with MRD, what an HIV physician does with a CD4/CD8 ratio. Active clinical practice (1 day/week NHS or honorary contract) is a strong positive signal. Qualities we are looking for Clinical empathy as the unit of value. You picture the GP at 4 p.m. on a Friday, the haematologist staring at a contradictory CBC, the patient waiting for their CD4 count. Their decisions are what the diagnostic exists to support. Sceptical of biomarker hype cycles. The graveyard of diagnostics is full of biomarkers that passed analytical validation and failed clinical utility. You can tell the difference, and you have the scar tissue. Comfortable moving at two speeds. Science fast, exploratory, opinionated. Regulatory slow, evidence-graded, conservative. You hold both in your head without conflating them. Intellectually honest about uncertainty. When the data don’t support the claim, you say so before the investors do. Bias to engage clinicians directly. Design partners and KOLs are not slide-deck names; they are people you can pick up the phone to. Long-horizon patience. Pivotal-study readouts are years away. We are building for a decade. What we offer Done > perfect. A prototype on the bench is worth a thousand-slide deck. Outcome > metrics > intuition. Metrics are how we navigate; outcomes are what we are navigating to; intuition is what we tolerate when neither is available. A bad decision is better than no decision. Founding teams die of indecision more often than bad calls. Over-communicate by default. Ambiguity within the founding team is the single biggest unforced error early. Compassion and trust over performance incentives. Compensation gets people in the door; trust keeps them building. Founding team-level equity. Salary set at pre-seed close, calibrated to the round size and the role’s market reality at that point. Who you’d be working with Prathap, the founder. Repeat founder and AI expert, London-based. Software engineer by training, hardware-startup founder by choice, pulled into life-sciences instrumentation because lab-on-achip is the wedge that puts cutting-edge diagnostics into the hands of the half of humanity that doesn’t have access to a teaching hospital. Built the multi-physics BO engine that produced the current tape-out candidate, drafted the priority patent specification, and owns GTM, funding, and the early organisation. I’m not a clinician or a biomedical scientist. Panel design, biomarker selection, regulatory interpretation, these are the parts of the science I can’t run myself, and I’m not planning to. They’re the parts you’d own end-to-end: which markers we ship first, the clinical decision each marker supports, the regulatory pathway, the advisory board. I’d back your calls, not second-guess them. How we work? The bits that matter to a daily relationship Done > perfect. A prototype on the bench is worth a thousand-slide deck. Outcome > metrics > intuition. Metrics are how we navigate; outcomes are what we are navigating to; intuition is what we tolerate when neither is available. A bad decision is better than no decision. Founding teams die of indecision more often than bad calls. Over-communicate by default. Ambiguity within the founding team is the single biggest unforced error early. Compassion and trust over performance incentives. Compensation gets people in the door; trust keeps them building.