Cheminformatician

CK Group are working in partnership with Nxera Pharma to recruit for a Cheminformatician to join their Computational Chemistry team.
Applications are welcomed from candidates that have recently completed a PhD in cheminformatics, computational chemistry, or a related discipline, through to candidates with several years post PhD experience. 
 
Location:
Granta Park, Cambridge.
 
About the company:
Nxera Pharma (formerly Sosei Heptares) is a technology powered biopharma company, in pursuit of new speciality medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs globally. Their pipeline is focused on addressing major unmet needs in some of the fastest-growing areas of medicine across CNS, GI and immunology, metabolic disorders and rare diseases, and leverages the power of their unique and industry leading GPCR-targeted structure-based drug discovery “NxWave” platform to provide a sustainable source of best- or first-in-class candidates.
In Cambridge UK, Nxera have built outstanding capabilities across their platform, discovery and translational medicine teams, to advance multiple programs from pre-clinical through to early clinical development
 
About the role:
Nxera are looking to grow their Computer-Aided Drug Design and Cheminformatics/AI capabilities by hiring a new Cheminformatician. This role offers an exciting opportunity to participate in cutting-edge science using unique structural data whilst making significant contributions to the industry-leading drug discovery R&D. You will be part of the Computational Chemistry team which 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. 
You will be part of a team actively involved in Nxera Pharma’s internal and partnered drug discovery projects, and AI and SBDD collaborations, meaning significant opportunities for scientific and leadership growth to contribute to advancing and leading drug discovery projects within multi-disciplinary teams.
 
 
Responsibilities will include:

• 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:
  • Development of new computational chemistry CADD software via external collaborations
  • Generative models for GPCR structure-based artificially intelligent molecular design
  • Structural bioinformatics and NxStaR® data driven GPCR protein engineering
  • Structural GPCRome and chemogenomics guided virtual ligand screening
  • GPCR-customised library design and analysis of NxStaR®-enabled screens (e.g. DEL)
  • Structure-based virtual screening of ultra-large databases

 
Skills and Experience:

• Ph.D. or equivalent experience in computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or a related discipline
• 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 attention to detail
• Excellent interpersonal, oral and written communication skills: you will need to be able to communicate effectively with team members having diverse professional backgrounds.
• An interest in designing methodologies and tools that bring new insights to the drug discovery process

Desirable:

• Experience in AI approaches such as Deep Generative Models or libraries such as PyTorch
• Familiarity with querying of relational databases and use of scientific workflow systems
• Computational chemistry experience within a collaborative multi-disciplinary medicinal chemistry research environment
• Background in molecular recognition and the structural and physicochemical property determinants of small molecule binding to proteins

 
What’s in it for you?

• State-of-the-art R&D centre located in the heart of the Cambridge science cluster· Competitive compensation package including discretionary cash bonuses.
• Eligible for grants of Restricted Stock Units.
• 25 days annual leave in addition to public holidays plus the option to purchase an additional 5 days each year.
• Employer contribution to pension.
• Private Medical Insurance for employees and family and a cash plan for dental and optical reimbursement.
• Health and wellbeing benefits including a subsidised individual gym membership.
• Income protection to cover long term absences due to ill health.
• Group Death in Service equal to 4x basic annual salary.

 
Apply:
Please quote job reference 105164 in all correspondence.