Commercial Strategy Manager, PharosAI

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About Us

In the UK, someone is diagnosed with cancer every two minutes, and across the world 10 million people die from cancer every year. Novel, targeted, less toxic treatments, biomarkers for early detection, diagnostics, and clinical applications are urgently needed.

Multimodal cancer AI models, that have the capability to process multiple modalities of health data, including pathology, multi-omics, radiology images, and clinical text, are demonstrating exceptional performance in drug discovery and clinical tasks. Yet their development is hindered by data access, fragmentation, harmonisation, and governance issues. PharosAI aims to solve this complex challenge, democratising cancer AI and accelerating the pathway to AI-powered cancer care, by providing multimodal cancer datasets to customers at scale, and demonstrating the value of these datasets through in-house and partner multimodal cancer AI models.

PharosAI is a contractual joint venture between two leading research-intensive universities, King's College London and Queen Mary University of London; and two innovative NHS Trusts, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust. PharosAI aims to accelerate AI-powered cancer care, driving breakthrough therapies, clinical applications, addressing cancer's social determinants, lowering barriers to UK SMEs, catalysing innovation, and positioning the UK as a global leader in this dynamic ecosystem.

PharosAI has been awarded £18.9M in Research Venture Catalyst funding from the UK government (Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology); and cash and in-kind contributions from partners across pharma, biotech, AI, and charities. PharosAI has exceptional stakeholder support from industry, policy-makers, and patients (Patient Involvement Voice and Outreach Team, PIVOT).

PharosAI seeks a Commercial Strategy Manager to further develop its commercialisation strategy, including customer insight, business model, and MVPs.

About The Role

The post of Commercial Strategy Manager is a 12-month fixed term contract with potential for extension, dependent on performance and on PharosAI's success. The post holder will work closely PharosAI's Chief Operating Officer, PharosAI's Chief Commercial Officer and an external consulting firm to develop and execute PharosAI's commercial strategy. A major component of the commercial strategy is development of successful commercial relationships with potential customers to co-design PharosAI MVP products and services. Other major strands include customer insight and development of an attractive business model and pricing strategy.

The post holder will lead the day-to-day coordination of the PharosAI Commercial Strategy Steering group across the consortium partners, to provide cross-partner input to key commercial issues. The post holder will also deliver a solid pipeline of potential future customers, providing valuable evidence of revenue potential for investment as PharosAI transitions from research to a commercial venture.

The post has no direct line management responsibilities but will work closely with and manage the targets and performance of the Commercial Strategy Delivery Partner, a small team hired via a consultancy contract.

This position requires an exceptional commercially-focused individual with knowledge and experience of the emerging life sciences, biotech and pharma AI sectors to support the ongoing development and execution of PharosAI's commercial strategy, business model, and client/ Minimum Viable Product (MVP) partner relationships.

This is a full-time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an a fixed term contract until 31 March 2027.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. Commercial experience and expertise - extensive experience of customer relationship development and revenue generation in a complex B2B environment, e.g. pharma, SaaS.
2. Strategy development skills - extensive experience of evidence-based strategy development and value proposition development in a commercial or consultancy environment, involving highly-developed research and analytical skills (e.g. of market, competitors, factors which influence value-creation).
3. Decision-making and problem-solving - ability to make decisions which create tangible value; ability to solve complex challenges and problems working in a highly complex multi-stakeholder environment.
4. Negotiation, influencing, deal closure - demonstrable experience of initiating, negotiating, and closing complex B2B customer relationship contracts involving substantial revenue and associated risks
5. Business model, IP licensing and financial modelling - understanding of data-driven and AI-enabled business models, including data and AI model licensing and terms of use. Substantial experience of modelling the revenue and cost implications of these, and translating these to compelling, investable business plans.
6. Senior stakeholder collaboration and engagement - ability to collaborate with, influence, persuade and build consensus in a highly-networked environment in which stakeholders cooperate through mutual benefit and goodwill, rather than command-and-control structures.
7. Communication and networking skills - highly developed interpersonal skills, listening, verbal/written communication and presentation skills, and a mature network of contacts and relationships in target customer segments. Diplomatic, adaptive, and comfortable with ambiguity.
8. Thorough knowledge and understanding of the emerging AI pharma and life sciences sector: Extensive experience of strategy and commercialisation in pharma/biotech and data/AI.

Desirable criteria

1. MBA or PhD preferred.
2. Understanding of the regulatory and governance requirements around customer requirements for use of data and AI for drug discovery and clinical diagnostics.
3. Experience of oncology research commercialisation would be an advantage.
4. Experience of delivery in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment.

Downloading a copy of our Job Description

Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document. To download the document please click 'Apply Now' at the bottom of this page. The job description is linked at the bottom of the page. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Further Information

At King's, we believe that the diversity of our community and a culture that is welcoming, open, inclusive and collaborative, are great strengths of the university.

The Equality Act of 2010 protects the rights of our students and staff and provides a framework to fulfil our duties to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and in addition, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. At times, this will include balancing rights and beliefs that can feel in tension.

We are committed to free speech and to academic freedom, believing that our foundational purpose as a university, is to create spaces where a wide range of ideas, including ideas that are controversial, can be discussed and debated, and where members of our community can express lawful views without fear of intimidation, harassment or discrimination.

When engaging in the robust exchange of ideas, we ask that our community is mindful of our Dignity at King's guidance.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the person specification section of the job description. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

We reserve the right to close adverts early due to the volume of applications we receive. While the closing date may change, all adverts will close at 23:59 to allow sufficient time for applications to be submitted on that day.

We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity to avoid disappointment as once we have closed a vacancy you will be unable to submit your application.

*We welcome your thoughts on how organisations can create an inclusive environment, including one which supports free speech and the exchange of a wide range of ideas. *

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ' How we Recruit ' pages.

Interviews are due to be held during the week commencing 16 and 23 March.