Position title: Research Officer - Computational Drug Discovery Biology

Employer: Children's Cancer Institute

Closing date: 22/05/2022

Brief position description: No targeted drug therapies exist for most common paediatric cancers. And the few targeted therapies available have mostly been developed for adult cancers, yet the mechanisms driving paediatric and adult cancers are usually different. Consequently, the only treatment option for many children is chemotherapies, which are harsh, unspecific and more harmful. For this role we are looking for a highly motivated and talented computational biologist to identify new vulnerabilities specific to paediatric oncology and support the discovery of new drugs targeting those vulnerabilities.

The successful candidate will join the THINK (THerapeutic INnovations for Kids) program, the only drug discovery research initiative in Australia focused solely on developing new and more effective treatments for children with cancer. Building on over 10 years of experience in high-throughput drug screening at Children’s Cancer Institute, THINK has established a target-to-clinical trials drug discovery capability focused on discovering new tailored treatments for children and adolescents who have no available targeted therapies to treat their cancer.

We are seeking a Research Officer to join the newly formed computational drug discovery biology group within THINK dedicated to 1) mining the wealth of existing genetic and biological information, including ZERO, to identify new drug discovery targets for THINK, and 2) accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs once targets enter the THINK pipeline.

The Research Officer will be responsible for intersecting internal and external information in order to propose new biological targets for paediatric oncology. The successful candidate will be an independent, highly motivated, and talented researcher, with a passion for conducting high quality research in the area of computational biology applied to therapeutic innovation in paediatric oncology.

Responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:
- Leverage high dimensional data to propose new targets or treatments specific to paediatric oncology
- Develop cutting-edge bioinformatics and AI methods to advance drug discovery. In particular:
* Working closely with the Translational Biology group using Cas13 functional screening to validate and explain novel vulnerabilities
* Working with the Drug Discovery group to interpret and maximize Compound Screening (HTS, HCS, etc…) results
* Proposing novel approaches to leverage existing datasets for the purpose of target identification or compound repurposing
- Discover and validate biomarkers of response to targeted perturbations specific to paediatric indications.
- Staying abreast on advances in genomics and next generation sequencing technology in general, maintaining knowledge about drug discovery and translational biology.
- Develop and apply tools to combine biological data sets with ‘omic and perturbation data sets to better integrate, manipulate, and interpret a child’s multi-‘omics tumour profile and vulnerabilities (genome, transcriptome, biology)

Job website: http://ccia.connxcareers.com/Job/Details/9552968dbb1141df9ad2adf95dd22f4e

Contact name: Antoine de Weck

Contact email: adeweck@ccia.org.au