Senior Scientist - Phage Display

CK Group are working in partnership with Nxera Pharma UK Limited (formerly Sosei Heptares) to recruit a lab-based Senior Scientist position in the Protein Binder Discovery team based in Granta Park, Cambridge.

Company:

Nxera Pharma is a technology powered biopharma company, in pursuit of new specialty medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs in Japan and globally, focused on therapeutic areas in inflammation diseases, neurology and immunology.

The Role:

We are searching for an experienced phage display scientist to join the Protein Binders team, part of our Platform Technology division at Nxera Pharma. The successful candidate will use phage display expertise to identify and characterise protein binders against therapeutic membrane protein targets to enable structure determination and drug discovery efforts. The candidate will work in interdisciplinary teams in a project-centric fashion, with the aim of accelerating the development of life-changing medicines.

The role will include the following responsibilities:

• Employing phage display technology to select protein binders against membrane protein targets
• Screening and validating hits using high-throughput assays e.g. ELISA formats, BLI, cell binding assays
• Assay development for challenging targets
• Subcloning of plasmid constructs for expression and protein engineering of antibody frameworks
• Biophysical evaluation of VHH hits
• Sharing your expertise, insights, and ideas with the team, and department to positively influence project success.
• Lab management to ensure equipment is regularly maintained and consumables organised efficiently
• Effective management of large datasets formulated for ease of sharing data

Requirements:

• PhD (or MSc/MRes with equivalent lab experience) in a relevant area of biology with at least 3-years experience carrying out phage display campaigns
• Theoretical and practical expertise in phage display technologies and selection techniques
• Experience working with phage antibody libraries and preferably VHH display
• Strong and evidenced molecular biology proficiency
• Demonstrable expertise in protein-protein interaction screening techniques
• Dynamic, analytical thinker with good problem-solving skills
• Have strong interpersonal skills and interact effectively with scientists across disciplines to generate timely and informative data.

Desirables:

• Measuring protein binder affinity using either BLI or SPR
• Affinity maturation
• Library build (either affinity maturation or immunised, naïve or synthetic libraries)
• Working with membrane proteins (in particular GPCRs)
• Computational expertise in protein binder design