What motivated you to embark on this journey and establish the company?


Simons Journey

What inspired you to start this journey and establish Sygnature?

“After working in large and mid-sized pharma, I was involved in outsourcing several services—and frankly, the experience was often disappointing. Once we engaged a company, we’d quickly realize they didn’t have the right skills, infrastructure, or research capabilities to deliver what we needed.

“Communication was another major issue. When problems arose, well-intentioned teams would try to fix things before raising the issue. By the time we found out, months had passed with little progress. Managing outsourced projects felt out of control—skills, capabilities, and communication were all lacking. I knew this could be done better. It had to be done better because drug discovery must succeed whenever possible.

“It was clear that outsourcing drug discovery would become a key part of the industry’s future. Drug discovery had to continue—and succeed. Everyone will be a patient one day, and as we age, the need for effective treatments only grows. The old pharma model was too rigid and lacked innovation. Outsourcing offered a flexible approach that could drive efficiency and enable adoption of new technologies—something big pharma simply couldn’t achieve.

“Drawing on my experience as a medicinal chemist and my industry contacts, I founded Sygnature Chemical Services in 2004. We started as a small chemistry group with computational chemistry support. Chemistry was our foundation, but the vision was always to build an integrated drug discovery service. I knew adding a credible bioscience team would be challenging, but in 2011, the closure of AstraZeneca’s Loughborough site created the opportunity. We expanded further in 2015 by incorporating DMPK, and in 2017, we added in vivo services to complement our DMPK and physical sciences capabilities.

“This journey has always been inspired by our customers and their needs. We continuously innovate, adding new services and technologies that create real value. From day one, our vision has been simple: drug discovery should be done better. We believe in doing things differently—developing and implementing new processes that improve the chances of successful outcomes.”