Senior Protein Scientist

CK Group are working in partnership with Avacta to recruit a Senior Protein Scientist to be based at their state of the art facilities in West London on a permanent basis.

About Avacta:
Avacta are a clinical stage oncology drug company.

Their aim is to utilise their innovative therapeutic and diagnostic platforms to treat cancer and other diseases to provide benefit to patients, including those who do not respond to existing therapies.
They have their own drug discovery and diagnostics development laboratories, whilst also collaborating with partners in academia and industry. Avacta’s Therapeutics division has recently relocated to Scale Space in London, a new hub of technology and life science organisations.

Their Affimer® biotherapeutics platform is a novel biotherapeutic based on a naturally occurring human protein. This can be engineered to bind target proteins with antibody-like affinity and specificity, with the benefit of engineering additional specificities and payload delivery.

Their pre|CISION™ tumour targeted chemotherapy is undergoing clinical trials. This targeted chemotherapy platform releases active drug only in the tumour, thereby limiting systemic exposure of potentially toxic anti-cancer treatments.

Innovation and collaboration is key for Avacta, and they are looking to expand the team with people who can further drive their exciting programmes forward.

About the role:

• You will be responsible for developing and executing strategies and experimental work. You will deliver complex biologics including antibodies, antibody fragments and related molecules, and fusion proteins.
• You will also deliver and quality control a range of other proteins to support programme delivery
• You will maintain expertise in the subject area, developing new approaches to support protein production and QC analysis. You will be able to work independently and communicate effectively across disciplines
• You will collaborate with external partners and present work at both internal meetings and to external collaborating partners
• Your work will be within multi-disciplinary teams: flexibility to work on multiple programmes and different functional activities and resilience to move between these are key
• Knowledge of structural biology, molecular biology, antibody libraries or cell-based assays would also be valuable.

About you:
To be considered for the position you should have the following skills and experience:

• PhD (or equivalent experience) with relevant lab-based experience
• Experience in protein expression in bacterial and mammalian cells, and purification using AKTA systems.
• Experience of various purification approaches, providing innovative solutions to trouble-shoot and optimise procedures
• Experience of protein characterisation and QC, using techniques including analytical HPLC and thermostability studies
• Experience in biophysical techniques to characterise proteins including SPR (Biacore) or BLI (Octet)

The benefits:
Avacta offer an excellent range of benefits, including:

• Private medical cover
• Annual performance related bonus of up to 10% of salary
• Life assurance
• Company pension scheme
• 25 Days annual leave + Bank Holidays
• Share Incentive Plans

Apply:
For more information or to apply for this position, please contact Sarah Farrow on 0191 3706486 or email sfarrow@ckgroup.co.uk.
It is essential that applicants hold entitlement to work in the UK.
Please quote job reference 53733 in all correspondence.