Senior Computational Chemist

SoseiHeptares Cambridge Großbritannien
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Firmenbeschreibung

Sosei Heptares (the corporate brand of Sosei Group Corporation) is a research-focused biotechnology group, publicly listed in Japan (TSE: 4565) and with sites in Tokyo, London and Cambridge (UK).

Our mission is to make a significant contribution to improving the quality of life and health of people around the world. To achieve this, we will discover, design and develop the most innovative and effective medicines for patients worldwide, through our world-leading patent-protected technology and platform.

Our primary focus is the discovery and early development of new medicines originating from its proprietary G Protein-Coupled Receptor (GPCR)-targeted StaR® technology and Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) platform capabilities. The company is advancing a broad and deep pipeline of novel medicines across multiple therapeutic areas, including CNS, immuno-oncology, gastroenterology, inflammation and other rare/specialty indications.

Our Company has established partnerships with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, including AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Biohaven, Genentech (Roche), GSK, Novartis, Pfizer and Takeda and additionally with multiple emerging technology companies. Sosei Heptares is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with corporate and R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK.

Sosei Heptares has approximately 161 employees based at its new R&D research facility at Granta Park. The size of the company ensures a transparent linkage between all activities from early discovery through to clinical development.

Stellenbeschreibung

Purpose

We are growing our Computer-Aided Drug Design and Cheminformatics/AI capabilities, by extending our Computational Chemistry team, with an addition of a Computational Chemist/Cheminformatician.

This is an exciting and exceptional opportunity to participate in cutting-edge science using unique structural data whilst making significant contributions to the industry-leading drug discovery R&D. The Computational Chemistry team uses state-of-the-art CADD techniques to support and drive discovery projects from early exploratory stage to clinical candidate stage working closely with chemistry, pharmacology, biophysics and structural biology teams. The team is actively involved in Sosei Heptares internal and partnered drug discovery projects, and AI and SBDD collaborations, providing significant opportunities for scientific and leadership growth to contribute to advancing and leading drug discovery projects within multi-disciplinary teams.

Please apply if you feel passionate about joining our team where scientific excellence and passion combine in a friendly fun environment to impact drug discovery projects and create new cutting-edge approaches.

Responsibilities

As member of the Computational Chemistry team, you:

  • Contribute to multidisciplinary GPCR SBDD projects by applying a broad set of computational chemistry and cheminformatics approaches to support and creatively contribute to data-driven molecular design and medicinal chemistry efforts.

  • Develop and apply customised computational chemistry and cheminformatics tools, workflows and models to extract, integrate, analyse and visualise complex chemical, structural, pharmacological and ADMET data within the context of structure-based drug discovery.

Play an active role in new initiatives, such as;

  • Structural GPCRome and chemogenomics guided virtual ligand screening
  • GPCR SBDD optimized alchemical relative binding free energy approaches
  • Development of new computational chemistry CADD software via external collaborations
  • Generative models for GPCR structure-based artificially intelligent molecular design
  • Structural bioinformatics and StaR® data driven GPCR protein engineering
  • Structure-based optimization of GPCR StaR® enabled DNA-Encoded Library screening hits
  • GPCR structure-based design of Targeted Protein Degraders

Anforderungsprofil

  • Ph.D. or equivalent experience in computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or a related discipline
  • Strong background in molecular recognition and the structural and physicochemical property determinants of small molecule binding to proteins
  • Computational chemistry experience within a collaborative multi-disciplinary medicinal chemistry research environment
  • Working knowledge and hands-on experience with molecular modelling, computer-aided drug design and cheminformatics software packages
  • Experience in using CADD approaches to investigate structural protein-ligand interactions, including phamacophore modeling and molecular docking
  • Experience using cheminformatics toolkits or computational chemistry tools to solve problems such as similarity searching, matched pair analysis, clustering, QSAR modelling, visualisation of structure-activity relationships and virtual library enumeration.
  • Strong coding skills in Python and familiarity with common data science packages
  • Advanced analytical and critical problem-solving skills, combined with scientific creativity and a proactive, positive can-do attitude
  • Strong team player with an inclusive, pro-active and positive can-do mindset that is willing to listen and learn from others.
  • Excellent interpersonal, oral and written communication skills: you will need to be able to communicate effectively with team members having diverse professional backgrounds.

Expertise and willingness to drive and implement improved processes in at least two of the following areas:

  • Structure-based GPCR ligand design, including structural modeling of GPCR-ligand complexes
  • Development of tools (workflows, webapps or equivalent) for use by medicinal chemists for interpretation of project data or to guide idea generation
  • Computational structural chemogenomics approaches for virtual ligand screening
  • AI/ML approaches such as Deep Generative Models for molecular design.

Sonstige Informationen

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Heptares is an equal opportunities employer.

Applications should include a covering letter, providing a short description of the background to their interest in the role, with curriculum vitae including the names and contact details for two referees. Please apply through our on-line jobs’ portal with your application in pdf format, quoting reference number 2021-CC03. The closing date for applications is 13th August 2021.

Sosei Heptares does not accept speculative or unsolicited CVs from agencies. All speculative or unsolicited CVs submitted without an agreement in place will be considered Sosei Heptares's property and will not obligate us to pay a referral fee.