Technician - mRNA translation in cancer immunology

The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam is a Comprehensive Cancer Centre combining a hospital and research laboratories in a single independent organization. The research group of Reuven Agami at the division of Oncogenomics is interested in identifying new cellular vulnerabilities that can be exploited for cancer therapies. Using innovative genomic and functional genetic strategies in combination with biochemical and bioinformatics approaches they aim at better understanding underlying molecular mechanisms of potential novel cancer therapies.
In recent years the Agami lab studied amino acid shortages and their impact on mRNA translation in cancer mainly using Ribosome Profiling and CRISPR-screens (Loayza-Puch et al., Nature 2016; Slobodin et al., Cell 2017; Sun et al., EMBO 2020). This research line has led to uncover a surprising impact of amino acid shortages on proteins' quality. The group showed that prolonged amino acid deprivation leads to oncogene-dependent production of defective proteins by ribosomal frameshifting (Bartok et al., Nature 2021; Champagne et al., Mol. Cell 2021). These defective proteins can be processed and presented at the cell surface of cancer cells and be recognized by immune cells. Current work aims at unravelling the mechanisms that connect this phenomenon with cancer, setting up functional genetic screens to identify underlying mechanisms, and developing in vitro and in vivo tools to explore how this phenomenon can be utilized for cancer immunotherapy. 

Responsibilities:
The successful candidate will assist an ongoing research line in the lab to establish the link between defective protein production and cancer. He/she will be involved in functional genetic screenings, cell culture and biochemical experiments to utilize this knowledge for cancer therapy. The successful applicant will work together with PhD and Postdoc members of the agami lab and will assist in routine organization tasks of the lab.