Stephen Palmer

Dr. Palmer is a biopharmaceutical veteran with over 30 years of experience in drug discovery and development. This includes a rare combination of R&D expertise as a pharmaceutical executive at top global biopharmaceutical companies, scientific founder of biotech that was acquired by a public pharmaceutical company, and as a thought leader at an academic institution pioneering new uses of DNA-encoded libraries in drug discovery. During Dr. Palmer’s tenure at Merck Group, he served as Global Head of Reproductive Health Research, overseeing research, development, regulatory, and post-approval research and marketing activities of key women’s health drug programs. Dr. Palmer then led the spinout of the first orally-available FSH programs from Merck, becoming the scientific founder and CSO of TocopheRx, where he led a team to successfully develop two small-molecule FSH receptor (FSHR) allosteric agonists. The foundation was laid for Dr. Palmer’s success at Merck and TocopheRx during his early research in endometrial and cervical biology at J&J. His work in contraceptive research at the J&J Pharmaceutical Research & Development Institute (J&JPRI) led to the discovery of non-steroidal progestins and progesterone receptor modulators with high selectivity against androgen, corticosteroid, and estrogen receptors. Most recently, Dr. Palmer served as Associate Professor and Director of Lead Discovery and Development at the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor, where he led a team in applying DNA-encoded chemical library (DEC-Tec) technologies toward the discovery of novel regulators of reproductive, inflammatory, and oncology targets.