Staff Scientist - Vaccine Research

Join the forefront of groundbreaking research at theBeckman Research Institute of City of Hope, where we're changing lives and making a real difference in the fight against cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening illnesses. Our dedicated and compassionate faculty and staff are driven by a common mission: Contribute to innovative approaches in predicting, preventing, and curing diseases, shaping the future of medicine through cutting-edge research.

A Staff Scientist position is available in the Vaccine Research Laboratory of Dr. Don Diamond in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation. Dr. Diamond's research team is seeking a highly motivated candidate with skills and understanding in antigen presentation utilizing bioinformatics tools to be applied to vaccine development utilizing viral vectors to contribute to an effort in developing neoantigen expressing vaccines for clinical investigations.

The position is available as part of a multi-disciplinary research project to develop a neoantigen-based cancer vaccines to support an IND utilizing a highly efficient and fully synthetic poxvirus-vectored vaccine platform that has been derisked by its use in Phase 2 clinical trials as a Covid-19 vaccine (see NCT04977024, NCT05672355, and NCT04639466). Please refer to these publications for further background: doi:10.3390/vaccines11091492, PMC7705736, PMC8906816, PMID33257686, PMID31739399 describing the platform and earlier publications using a p53-expressing MVA as a clinical therapeutic in cancer patients (10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-23-0394, PMC8802616, PMC5856606, and PMC5706612).

As a successful candidate you will:

* Have experience and knowledge of human and murine immunology, selection tools for predicting immunologic epitopes complementing virology skills (poxvirus molecular biology)

* Develop and characterize recombinant vaccine vectors incorporating neoantigens identified by proprietary bioinformatic pipelines and test these vaccine candidates for in vivo immunogenicity and protective efficacy in different animal tumor models leading to early phase clinical trials in pancreas, lung, and bladder tumor patients. The goal of these efforts is a start-up company utilizing GMP manufacturing to produce neoantigen vaccines for patients at medical centers nationally as a primary goal.

Your qualifications should include:

* PhD degree in an appropriate discipline such as cellular or tumor immunology or related fields and preferably 2-3 years of post-doctoral experience in relevant laboratory work.

* Interest and knowledge in vaccine research (poxvirus especially) and neoantigen-based vaccine methods utilizing bioinformatics epitope selection pipelines.

* Experience in molecular virology methods, and antigen presentation and processing as applied to human and murine oncology.

* Ability to independently document scientific progress and write research articles.

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