We are looking to recruit a highly motivated Senior Scientific Officer who is a self-starter with key qualities including independent thinking, and proactive problem solving.
This is an exciting and challenging opportunity to work at the forefront of translational medicine and contribute to assay development that will ultimately inform clinical decision making. We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates who have, or may wish to develop, computational skills for the analysis of transcriptomics data.
Background:
The Cancer Research UK Cancer Biomarker Centre (NBC) led by Prof Caroline Dive CBE aims to enhance clinical trials of new anticancer drugs through translational research. Immunotherapy is currently a rapidly expanding research area in oncology and profiling of patient samples is essential to predict responses, identify candidate biomarkers and personalise therapy aimed at harnessing the immune system to target the tumour. To investigate the challenges posed by this emerging field we are collaborating with the research group of Dr Santiago Zelenay (CRUK Manchester Institute) to establish a biomarker assay platform using patient derived tumour fragments (PDTF).
Due to ongoing success of the PDTF team, we are now seeking to recruit a highly motivated Senior Scientific Officer based within CRUK NBC Translational Immunology Team and the CRUK Manchester Institute Cancer Inflammation and Immunity group. This is a challenging opportunity to work at the forefront of translational medicine and contribute to assay development that will ultimately inform clinical decision making.
The post holder will be required to develop and contribute to studies that employee the PDTF platform to predict and investigate immunotherapy benefit by establishing immune-competent cultures from patient-derived tumour fragments and analysing activation of tumour-resident immune cells. The post-holder will analyse various endpoints including T cell activation, cytokine production and cancer cell viability, using techniques such as flow cytometry, cytokine/chemokine multi-assays and transcriptional profiling.
About you: You will hold a degree (or equivalent) in Biological Sciences or related subject (or have equivalent relevant experience) along with extensive experience of carrying out several routine cell biology and molecular biology laboratory techniques, including cell culture and protein expression analysis. A sound foundational knowledge and interest in the immunology field is essential along with experience in assay development and validation, ideally gained working in a biomarker research environment. A postgraduate degree in biological sciences and knowledge of cancer biology is desirable along with existing expertise in bioinformatics.
This project will require some evening work due to the timing of sample receipt.
Why choose Cancer Research UK National Biomarker Centre?
We are a leading and highly specialised translational research centre within The University of Manchester (www.manchester.ac.uk), aligned with the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute (www.cruk.manchester.ac.uk), and core-funded by Cancer Research UK (www.cancerresearchuk.org), the largest independent cancer research organisation in the world. In spring 2023 the Institute moved into the state-of-the-art Paterson Building, a £150 million flagship purpose-built biomedical research centre directly attached to The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in South Manchester (www.christie.nhs.uk), one of the largest cancer treatment centres in Europe. These factors combine to provide an exceptional environment in which to pursue basic, translational and clinical research programmes.
Our Centre discovers, develops, validates and qualifies biomarkers in clinical studies and trials that detect cancer earlier and predict and monitor therapy responses to support optimised treatment of patients with cancer. Our advanced research programmes, agnostic to cancer type, develop biomarkers in tissue and less invasive clinical samples such as blood (liquid biopsy) with sophisticated bioinformatic and artificial intelligence solutions for multi-modal laboratory and clinical biomarker data analysis and interpretation. As a bridge between discovery science and clinical research, we are highly collaborative across Manchester, nationally and internationally.
For job description, further particulars and to apply visit JobMarker
For any informal enquiries about this post, please contact Dr Santiago Zelenay: santiago.zelenay@cruk.manchester.ac.uk ; or CRUK-NBC team lead Dr David Millrine: david.millrine@cruk.manchester.ac.uk
Please note this vacancy will close for applications at 11:59pm on the closing date specified.
