Postdoctoral Fellow- Drug Targets for Neurodegeneration Disorders

The Opportunity:

The Parts lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, in collaboration with Andrew Bassett (Sanger) and Florian Merkle (Cambridge), is seeking a highly motivated researcher with strong computational and quantitative skills to fill a postdoctoral fellow position. This role is focused on identifying new drug targets for neurodegenerative disorders using novel data from CRISPR + scRNAseq experiments and accumulated public datasets. Your projects will stem from the intersection of high-throughput single cell RNA sequencing, genetic perturbations via CRISPR/Cas, stem cell derived neuronal cell types, and external evidence to prioritize and understand genes that drive neurodegeneration.

 About the Role:

The NeuroID project aims to identify new targets for debilitating neurodegenerative diseases. To do so, we use computational target prioritization for experiments, followed by large-scale data generation in disease-relevant cell types, and their analyses. The questions that we are seeking to answer by this are: what are the cellular and transcriptomic phenotypes perturbed in induced pluripotent stem cell derived models of neurodegenerative diseases? Which phenotypes and cell models are most relevant? What are the downstream effectors of disease mutations? Are there disease subtypes that correspond to different genes or mechanisms of actions? Are there commonalities across diseases? We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow motivated by these questions to drive a research programme to answer them - by helping systematically integrate available evidence for prioritization, by sensitively analysing the generated scRNAseq+CRISPR data to spot signal for causal effects, and by linking other data resources to the findings to build evidence to involvement of different genes and cell types. You will join two experimental postdocs and a research assistant who are dedicated to generating large scale data to analysis, and using the outputs of the analysis to follow up candidates for further validation. Our industry partners are keen to build on the targets to bring benefits of this work to the patients.

About Us:
This position offers the opportunity to work at one of the world’s leading genomic centres at the forefront of genomic research. You will have access to Sanger's computational resources, including a 15000+ core computational cluster, the largest in life science research in Europe, and multiple petabytes of high-speed cluster file systems. Our group has a vibrant wet-lab and access to core facilities, where we generate our own data with the help of dedicated staff. This provides an exciting opportunity for you to not only analyse the data, but to be actively involved in the planning and execution of large-scale experiments. We are part of a dynamic and collaborative environment at the Genome Campus and you will have the opportunity to interact with researchers across Sanger. In particular, we often share interests with colleagues from OpenTargets, Human Genetics and Cellular Genetics Programmes, as well as the European Bioinformatics Institute.

 About You:

It is important you have the ability to bridge from conceptualizing the research in the context of current scientific knowledge, to planning the experiments, carrying them out [or supervising them] to a high standard, and robustly analyzing the data. You are expected to make progress on your project as the first priority, while budgeting time for training in further skills, piloting new leads, and potentially collaborating on other related projects. To function effectively in a multidisciplinary, collaborative setting, you have to have the ability to communicate well with scientists from diverse backgrounds.

Please apply with your CV and a Cover letter outlining your suitability for the role addressing the criteria set out above and in the job description.

Open Targets is a pioneering public-private partnership between European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the Wellcome Sanger Institute (Sanger), Sanofi and Bristol Meyers Squibb (BMS), located at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK.  

Open Targets brings together expertise from five complementary institutions to generate evidence on the biological validity of therapeutic targets and provide an initial assessment of the likely effectiveness of pharmacological intervention on these targets, using genome-scale experiments and analysis. Open Targets aims to provide an R&D framework that applies to all aspects of human disease to improve the success rate of discovering new medicines and share data openly in the interest of accelerating drug discovery.