Wellcome Trust

Salary: £102,200

Closing date: Monday 24 February

Contract type: Permanent

The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation. We improve health for everyone by funding science, leading policy, and advocacy campaigns, and building partnerships. 

We plan to spend £16bn over the next ten years, funding new discoveries in life, health, and wellbeing, and taking on three global health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate and health. 

Wellcome delivers impact from its funding through working together with a wide range of partners, and engaging across a project lifecycle to ensure that the products and interventions it supports are affordable, available and accessible to populations affected by the challenges we have chosen to take on. To deliver this impact, Wellcome engages with data-informed decision making, social investment models, and uses different levers across the life cycle of the projects it supports. It is vital that Wellcome takes a structured, coherent and appropriate approach to the work in this space, in order to maximise the impact we can have from our funding portfolio as well as ensuring that no disproportionate private benefits arises from our philanthropic funding. 

Wellcome’s Innovation and Access team is an internal expert group which is designed to focus on commercial, intellectual property and business development activities in Wellcome’s translational portfolio, as well as the evolution to a more structured approach to equitable access at programmatic levels. 

The role will involve working across multiple Strategic Programmes at Wellcome (but primarily with Infectious Diseases and Mental Health) by supporting teams on commercial transactions and workstreams. This will involve providing expert advice and informing decision-making at key inflection points on transactions (from engaging on the funding approach at the beginning of a project, to agreeing exit terms), as well as helping teams work through opportunities to engage with the private sector in their portfolios at a more strategic level. The role will involve ensuring that our charitable investments are appropriately handled, in accordance with charitable law, and also will involve considering the Wellcome approach around where we can use potential financial returns due to us to incentivise more impact for patient populations most affected by the challenges we have chosen. 

The role will involve significant stakeholder engagement – forming relationships with funding teams across Solutions and Discovery, and also working with subject matter experts in Policy, Legal and Research Funding to ensure a one-Wellcome approach, with Wellcome’s internal practice supporting and reflecting Wellcome’s external activities. 

In this role you will: 

• Work with the Head of the Innovation and Access to act as an internal expert on business development related matters (such as commercial returns, social investment structures, intellectual property ownership, and the ways that commercial returns can be used to incentivise equitable access). The role is intended to add value and support to translational programmes across the Solutions portfolio (particularly in relevant transactions, programmes or workstreams within Infectious Diseases and Mental Health). 
• Ensure that the principles underpinning decisions on how to approach various different transaction types across translational portfolios are expressly brought out from decisions, in order to create a structured approach to informing decision-making on business development matters within the portfolio. 
• Ensuring that activities are coherent with and aligned to the Innovation and Access team’s equitable access team, as well as with other key stakeholders within Wellcome such as Legal and Policy teams. 
• Ensuring that information arising from programme related investment activities is appropriately and proactively tracked, so that Wellcome has up to date information about the social (programme related) investments it holds, and the impact that it has/can deliver. 
• Advocate for Wellcome and the Innovation and Access team to raise the profile of the work and its impact internally and, where appropriate, externally. 
• Contribute to a diverse and inclusive culture across the organisation, collaborating across departments. 

To be successful in this role you will have: 

• Proven significant experience and knowledge of IP management, commercialisation (routes and steps to implementation including for companies both small and large) and business development from a philanthropic perspective (including, for example, considering reasonable expectations from funders at different points of the development path). 
• Broad experience of taking a leading role in technical matters in negotiations with external partners – with an ability to understand the key drivers and constraints of others, and taking an approach to imaginatively find win-win solutions. This should also include an understanding of the needs, constraints and sensitivities of private sector partners in different market segments, as well as confidence in dealing with the provisions of legals agreements. 
• Experience in exercising judgement for commercial decision-making on R&D transactions. Experience within Pharma, Venture or Biotech. 
• Experience of business development activities across a project lifecycle including project inception, due diligence, commercialisation, various exit forms (e.g. IPOs, share sales) and insolvency. 
• Excellent analytical skills with a high level of attention to detail. Ability to work through unfamiliar problems and make assumptions to help novel workstreams progress and deliver in a timely manner. Able to identify areas where external expertise is needed, and then to identify, bring in, and manage the same. 
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to build strong relationships with a wide range of stakeholders at all levels. 

To apply please upload your current CV and complete our short application. 

Interview dates: w/c 1 April

You can view the full job description on our website

You can read more about the benefits we offer our employees on our website 

Our Hybrid Way of Working 

We understand that our colleagues have commitments and personal interests outside of work and we strive to build a flexible working environment, in which people can perform at their best. 

At Wellcome we have a hybrid way of working which is 3 days in our Euston Road offices (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) with the remaining 2 days working either remotely or in the office. 

Diversity and Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do 

Diversity and Inclusion is a priority at Wellcome. We are committed to cultivating a fair and inclusive environment, where everyone can be themselves and thrive. We are happy to discuss flexible working options for all roles. We work to ensure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible to everyone. This includes making adjustments for people who have a disability or long-term condition. Please visit our website for more information on adjustments and accessibility, or contact us at jobs@wellcome.org. 

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