Profile

Hermkens Pharma Consultancy BV was founded in November 2012 as a reaction on many requests for support from start-up companies aligned to the Radboud University Nijmegen.

The main goal of the company is to build long term relationships with customers. Therefore, the focus is on start-ups and small sized biotech companies, who cannot yet fully support a medicinal chemist expert.  Keywords are trust, quality, flexibility, client directed, long term commitment.

Pedro Hermkens (PhD) has a scientific background in organic chemistry, pharmacology and biochemistry. The last 21 years he worked at Organon, Schering-Plough and MSD (Merck) in the Medicinal Chemistry Department were he was responsible for projects in several therapeutic areas as team leader. Furthermore, he has experience in the early stage of the process as Discovery Leader. In this role he was responsible for managing target identification & validation, assay development, screening & hit identification & optimization. The last few years he was section head  Lead Optimization (Director Medicinal Chemistry) managing 3-4 project teams in parallel  from lead to development candidate in different therapeutic areas; immunology, oncology and women’s health. He has experience in many different target families such as nuclear receptors, kinases, proteases and GPCRs. During his career he was heavily involved in combinatorial chemistry, automation of chemistry and library design. Also he was responsible for setting up an external network of CRO’s allowing to do virtual research with in-house projects.

1 February 2008 he was appointed as extraordinary professor Medicinal Chemistry at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In this position is providing training in medicinal chemistry to bachelor and master students, building bridges to the Medical Center by identifying common grounds for projects and is providing support to the synthetic Organic Chemistry group of Prof. Floris Rutjes.