CK Group are working in partnership with Nxera Pharma UK Limited (formerly Sosei Heptares) to recruit a lab-based Senior Scientist in Protein Binder Discovery 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:
The successful candidate will join the Protein Binders Discovery Team at Nxera Pharma and will also be part of the wider Biochemistry and Biophysics teams. The successful candidate will use phage display expertise to select protein binders against therapeutic membrane protein targets to enable structure determination and drug discovery efforts. 

The role will include the following responsibilities:

• Screening phage display libraries against membrane protein targets 
• Protein engineering of VHH frameworks
• Subcloning of plasmid constructs for expression 
• Biophysical evaluation of VHH hits

Your Background:

• PhD (or MSc with equivalent lab experience) in a relevant area of biology
• 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 
• Experience of screening techniques (eg ELISA, cell binding assays etc)
• Experience of affinity maturation
• Analytical thinking and good problem-solving skills

DESIRABLE:

• Experience of measuring affinity using either BLI or SPR
• Experience of library build (either affinity maturation or immunised, naïve or synthetic libraries)
• Experience in working with membrane proteins (in particular GPCRs)
• Computational expertise focussed around protein binder design would be advantageous

 
Apply:
It is essential that applicants hold entitlement to work in the UK. Please quote job reference 99230 in all correspondence.