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Drug-Patent Relationship Specialist

  • On-site
    • Singapore, Central Singapore, Singapore
  • Product & Engineering: Life Sciences

Job description

Drug-Patent Relationship Specialist

➡️ Experienced in pharmaceutical patents, life sciences intelligence or IP data — and enjoy figuring out what a patent actually means for a drug?

➡️ Confident navigating patent claims, families, chemical structures, targets and indications to separate meaningful relationships from weak or misleading connections?

➡️ Excited by the opportunity to combine your scientific and patent expertise with AI to build more accurate, scalable life sciences intelligence?

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you!

Role Summary:

We're looking for a Drug-Patent Relationship Specialist to join PatSnap in Singapore and help us build high-quality intelligence connecting pharmaceutical products with the patents that matter.

Understanding the relationship between a drug and a patent isn't always straightforward. A patent might explicitly claim a compound, cover a related structure, describe a therapeutic target or indication, belong to a relevant patent family, or appear connected while ultimately having little meaningful relationship to the drug.

That's where you come in. You'll use your knowledge of patents, pharmaceuticals and life sciences information to investigate these relationships, evaluate the strength of the evidence and determine which patents are most relevant. You'll review everything from abstracts and claims to patent families, applicants and publicly available drug information, documenting not just your conclusions but the evidence and reasoning behind them.

Importantly, this isn't traditional patent prosecution or legal practice, and you don't need to be a qualified patent attorney. We're looking for someone who enjoys analytical investigation: digging into complex scientific and patent information, making careful evidence-based judgements and creating structured intelligence that others can trust.

You'll also work closely with our AI and data teams to turn expert human judgement into scalable AI workflows — helping define the rules, examples and quality standards that enable our technology to make increasingly accurate drug-patent connections.

This role is an in-office role based in our Singapore office.

Who are we?

PatSnap is a global, Series E, unicorn SaaS platform that transforms the way organizations harness their Intellectual Property and Research & Development productivity. Our user-friendly platform revolutionizes how IP and R&D teams collaborate across the entire innovation lifecycle — using industry-leading, domain-specific AI to generate and validate ideas and bring innovative products to market faster, better, and cheaper. More than 12,000 R&D and IP teams worldwide use and trust PatSnap to innovate and commercialize new products.

As the leading global Life Sciences intelligence platform, PatSnap helps pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, and life sciences organisations make better innovation decisions. By connecting patents, scientific literature, clinical trials, regulatory data, and market intelligence, we enable our customers to identify white spaces, reduce R&D risk, and accelerate breakthrough innovation.

We have a vibrant and diverse team with offices in Toronto, London, Shanghai, and Singapore. Our hyper-growth trajectory is powered by our people, and we are extremely proud of our company-wide vision, work ethic, and entrepreneurial spirit. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where talent thrives and ideas bloom.

What You'll Be Doing:

As a Drug-Patent Relationship Specialist, you'll be responsible for determining how — and how strongly — patents relate to pharmaceutical products and their underlying science.

This is a role for someone who enjoys going beyond keywords and surface-level matches. You'll investigate the evidence, apply scientific and patent knowledge, document your reasoning and help establish the standards that determine what a high-quality drug-patent relationship looks like.

You will:

  • Analyze drug-patent relationships, evaluating potentially relevant patents and classifying them as core, recommended, requiring low-confidence review, or excluded.

  • Investigate patent documentation in depth, including titles, abstracts, claims, descriptions, patent families, applicants and other relevant information.

  • Determine how patents relate to pharmaceutical products, assessing relationships involving drugs, chemical structures, biological targets, indications, mechanisms and other relevant scientific concepts.

  • Look beyond individual patent records, using patent families and publicly available information to build a more complete picture of the relationship between an invention and a drug.

  • Document the evidence behind your decisions, capturing relevant evidence snippets, sources, relationship types, confidence levels and reasons for review or exclusion.

  • Make careful judgements where evidence is ambiguous, clearly distinguishing between confirmed relationships, plausible connections and low-confidence or irrelevant results.

  • Help define our drug-patent relationship framework, contributing to relationship schemas, recommendation tiers, exclusion rules and quality standards.

  • Work closely with our AI Native Data Engineer, translating expert patent judgement into prompts, quality-assurance rules and libraries of representative errors and edge cases.

  • Use AI as part of your workflow, identifying opportunities to improve the consistency, repeatability and throughput of patent analysis while maintaining high quality standards.

  • Continuously improve quality, identifying recurring error patterns and helping develop better rules and approaches for handling complex drug-patent relationships at scale.

Job requirements

What We'd Love From You

You don't need to be a patent attorney. We're looking for someone who understands life sciences and patent information, thinks analytically and can make well-supported judgements from complex evidence.

We're looking for someone who:

  • Has 2+ years of experience working with patent data, pharmaceutical patents, life sciences intelligence, pharmaceutical data, IP content analysis or a closely related area.

  • Is comfortable reading and interpreting English-language patent materials, including titles, abstracts, claims, descriptions, patent families and applicant information.

  • Can investigate drug-related evidence across multiple sources and form a reasoned view about whether a patent is genuinely relevant.

  • Has knowledge or experience in pharmaceuticals, chemistry, biology, patent information, life sciences intelligence or a related discipline.

  • Has strong analytical skills and is comfortable working with information where the answer isn't always immediately obvious.

  • Can clearly document evidence, uncertainty and reasoning, enabling someone else to understand how and why you reached a conclusion.

  • Has strong attention to detail and can consistently apply classification rules and quality standards across large volumes of information.

  • Is comfortable using AI tools as part of your day-to-day work and interested in using them to make expert analysis more efficient and repeatable.

  • Enjoys identifying patterns, edge cases and recurring errors, and turning those observations into clearer rules and better processes.

  • Can collaborate effectively with technical colleagues, translating domain expertise into concepts that can be incorporated into prompts, QA processes and AI-powered workflows.

  • Is comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where processes and technology will continue to evolve.

Even Better If You Have:

  • A degree or professional background in pharmaceutical sciences, medicinal chemistry, chemistry, biology, bioinformatics or another life sciences discipline.

  • Hands-on experience researching or analysing drug-related patents.

  • Experience with patent databases, pharmaceutical intelligence platforms or life sciences data products.

  • Familiarity with analysing relationships between patents and chemical structures, biological targets, therapeutic indications or mechanisms of action.

  • Experience working with structured data classification, taxonomy development, data quality or content curation.

  • Experience using LLMs or other AI tools for patent, scientific or life sciences research.

  • The ability to collaborate professionally in both Chinese and English.

Above all, we're looking for someone who combines scientific curiosity, patent intelligence and rigorous judgement. If you enjoy investigating complex evidence, care about getting the details right and are excited about turning specialist expertise into AI-powered intelligence at scale, we'd love to hear from you.

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