Senior Scientist - Assay Development

THE COMPANY

Isogenica is a leading innovator in therapeutic antibody development, focused on enabling rapid advancement of next generation antibodies and antibody-based therapeutics through technical innovation.

llamdA® is Isogenica’s fully synthetic VHH single domain antibody library, proven to yield high quality antibody fragments to a variety of target classes. CIS Display, our proprietary display technology, perfectly complements very large synthetic libraries. Isogenica is exploiting its technology platforms to enable the discovery of novel antibody drugs that address significant unmet medical needs.

Over the past few years, Isogenica has built strong and lasting relationships with several biotech and biopharma partners, through licensing CIS Display and llamdA®, and via lead discovery alliances. This has resulted in a solid, diversified pipeline of partnered molecules – some of which are now in clinical development. In doing so, the company has built solid infrastructure and expertise for the discovery, characterization and optimization of therapeutic antibodies and antibody-based drugs.

Isogenica is now expanding its scope of activities to enable broader, deeper strategic relationships with biotech and pharmaceutical partners and to support internal antibody discovery and development. Aligned to this expansion, Isogenica is currently seeking a Senior Assay Development Scientist to join our Antibody Discovery and Development team.

WHO YOU ARE

You have an MSc or PhD in Immunology or a related field. Most preferably you will have several years’ experience of assay development in the CRO, Biotech or Biopharmaceutical industry, but candidates with strong academic research experience in immunology, cellular immunology and cell biology are also encouraged to apply.

You are an enthusiastic, self-motivated scientist capable of leading research projects autonomously. You have good organisational and project management skills as evidenced by your track record of delivering projects on-time and within budget.

You are a team player with excellent interpersonal skills who enjoys working in a collaborative environment. Your strong communication skills are also evident in your professional presentation of research outcomes via written reports and oral presentations.

You set high standards for yourself and your colleagues, which is evidenced by technical and project-based achievements throughout your career. These may include progress of programmes you have worked on into pre-clinical or clinical development, peer-reviewed publications, or the receipt of grants, awards and promotions.

You feel accountable for reaching team and personal goals and communicate promptly and clearly on progress towards these goals to your team, supervisors and partners.

You help to ensure a safe and efficient working environment for yourself and your colleagues, through knowledge of and adherence to company policies and health and safety guidelines.

THE ROLE

Leading assay development, you will be responsible for developing and implementing screening and characterisation assays to provide functional lead characterisation for progression of antibody-based therapies into clinical settings.

You will be capable of properly framing each project, understanding the business and scientific needs and regulatory context, and preparing detailed work plans that will lead to the generation of translationally relevant data packages. You will identify and develop assay development strategies, making appropriate use of internal expertise and external collaborators, commercial partners and CROs. and proposing and defending these approaches with senior management. Should issues arise, you will independently and pro-actively suggest and execute troubleshooting or optimization activities.

Reporting to the Director of Antibody Discovery and Development, the candidate will work independently and collaborate with a team of scientists working on therapeutic projects. The Antibody Discovery group designs and develops discovery programs, and performs assays to identify drugs, drug targets, and disease-associated signalling pathways.

Your time will be split between lab-based and office-based planning, project management and reporting on programmes. You will demonstrate your ability to work autonomously and successfully deliver programmes, and influence and lead colleagues to deliver shared goals.

You will communicate work plans to colleagues and senior management, and report concisely and clearly on project progression versus planning. You will be expected to offer mentoring and appropriate guidance to less experienced colleagues in the interests of delivering milestones.

Job-Specific Responsibilities:
• Identify and develop appropriate in vitro and in vivo assays to expose functional antibody characteristics and biology to enable translation of projects to the clinic.
• Disease biomarker identification, qualification and validation.
• Plan overall research goals, set timelines for multiple projects, and independently execute research plans with lab personnel.
• Guide cell production, modify and/or develop new protocols, procedures, techniques or applications of approaches and identify and integrate new findings in the field.
• Design, Plan and execute analytical flow cytometry (FACS) cell binding experiments and functional cell-based bioassays including receptor occupancy and reporter cell assays.
• Execute antibody biochemical binding assays in a variety of formats, chosen to suit the purpose and throughput (i.e. ELISA, Alphascreen or HTRF, SPR).
• Manage and maintain highly specialized screening equipment – including liquid handling and flow cytometry instrumentation.
• Evaluate and summarize approaches and data in line with research goals for presentation at the project, partner, and executive level.
• Contribute to writing research proposals and progress reports for multiple funding agencies and manuscripts/publications and/or presentations of research results.
• From time to time, you may be required to support antibody selections and screening campaigns using phage and CIS Display, to identify therapeutic candidate molecules.
Qualifications:
A PhD and/or MSc in Immunology (or related discipline) is required.

Experience:
• Experience of leading immunological assay development in a biotechnology or pharmaceutical company.
• Experience of managing projects for on-time, on-budget delivery
• Experience working with and project managing CROs and/or external collaborators.
• Designing and conducting screening assays.
• Experience in maintaining mouse and human primary and immortalised cell lines and in producing and maintaining differentiated cells.
• Strong knowledge of flow cytometry techniques.
• Knowledge or experience of running in vivo oncology models would be beneficial
• Knowledge of molecular biology techniques.
• Strong knowledge of screening and general familiarity with liquid handling robotics.
• Sequence analysis, and high throughput antibody sequence analysis / annotation.
• Strong organizational and communication skills.
• Ability to work with a multidisciplinary group of scientists in a dynamic team environment.
• Ability to tackle multiple projects simultaneously is essential.
• Supervisory experience and experience mentoring students/trainees.

This role will require work with primary cells of human origin. All candidates are required to confirm their Hepatitis B vaccination status upon application for this role.

Application Instructions: 

Salary: Highly competitive benefits package

Contract type: Full Time

Applications: CV and brief covering letter to: jobs@isogenica.com

Applicants must have the permanent right to work in the UK.

Application Closing Date: 
24 July 2020