Dr. Mark H. Norman

Dr. Mark Norman is currently the President of Scicon Solutions, a scientific consulting and contract research business that provides drug discovery services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Services include: Medicinal Chemistry consulting (to help guide project teams to identify high-quality drug candidates) and Discovery Research operational/management support (to help drive continuous improvement across functional and therapeutic areas to facilitate Discovery Research initiatives), and Expert Witness services (to provide input and assistance regarding intellectual property disputes).

In addition to consulting, Mark serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of ADRx, a privately funded preclinical stage biotechnology company located in Thousand Oaks, CA. Prior to these positions Mark was a Scientific Executive Director in the Therapeutic Discovery department at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California. He also taught Organic Chemistry as an adjunct professor in the Chemistry Department at Cal Lutheran University.

Dr. Norman has over 30 years of drug discovery and development experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector with Amgen, Glaxo Wellcome, and Burroughs Wellcome, where he held positions of increasing responsibility. At Burroughs Wellcome, his research efforts were directed toward the development of therapeutic agents to treat schizophrenia, hypertension, emesis, and viral infections. In one program he led a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort which resulted in the identification of a clinical candidate for schizophrenia. During his time at Glaxo Wellcome he was part of the parallel synthesis team that investigated several 7-transmembrane receptors as potential targets for diseases such as osteoporosis, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. In this role he invented a series of devices for use in the synthesis of combinatorial libraries employing Chiron’s crown and pin technology.

After his time at Glaxo Wellcome, he was recruited to Amgen to participate in the building of their small molecule drug discovery department and its infrastructure. While at Amgen, he led and managed various projects, from drug discovery to clinical trials, in the areas of oncology, inflammation, metabolic disorders, and neurobiology, resulting in the identification of eleven clinical candidates. In addition to his research responsibilities, Mark served as the Amgen Thousand Oaks (ATO)-B29 Site Head for safety. In this role he led a cross-functional Site-Safety team comprised of forty-five members from medicinal chemistry, chemical process research and discovery, molecular structure and characterization, discovery technologies, the therapeutic areas, environmental health, safety, and sustainability, and global facilities operations.

With over 235 publications, presentations, and patents, Dr. Norman has demonstrated a consistent track record of delivering therapeutic candidates for pre-clinical and clinical evaluation. Some of Dr. Norman’s publications have also obtained external recognition (e.g., a Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Highly Read Article Award and a Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters Most Cited Paper Award) and some of his work has also been utilized in external training programs (e.g., the TRPV1 research was used by Drew University School of Medicinal Chemistry as a case study to demonstrate how to overcome pharmacokinetic and solubility issues in drug development; and a series of PI3Kα publications were used as a case study in a Gordon Research Conference short course on “The Basics of Pharmacokinetic and Disease Model Studies for Drug Discovery using in vitro and in vivo Tools”).

Dr. Norman received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire (studying asymmetric reactions under Professor James Morrison) and his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Clayton Heathcock where he studied synthetic methodology and natural product synthesis.