Bioinformatician

Origin Sciences is a start-up biotechnology company based in Granta Park, just south of Cambridge. We develop our own innovative medical devices, which we use in clinical trials to collect a biobank of mucus-based biospecimens. This biobank provides clinical material for our research and development streams to assist with diagnostic development.

Our primary disease area is Colorectal Cancer (CRC).  We are creating a minimally invasive and accurate CRC diagnostic, which will allow the NHS to focus resources on patients with more serious pathologies. Our motivations are to reduce NHS waiting times, enable earlier CRC detection and reduce unnecessary investigations performed on healthy patients.

Our CRC diagnostic is analogous to blood-based liquid biopsies. However, we have the advantage of evaluating material that was collected closer to the pathology of interest.

The role:

We are seeking a Bioinformatician to join our Data Team and assist with end-to-end analysis of multi-omics data. The Bioinformatician will play a pivotal role in assessing the utility of rectal mucus for CRC detection using different technologies.

They will be involved in the development and validation of bioinformatics pipelines to integrate with our current suite of bioinformatics pipelines, written in Nextflow. From here, they will perform technical analysis to assess data quality and inform wet lab optimisations. They will also get the opportunity to analyse mutational and epigenetic signatures for biomarker identification.

Main Duties & Responsibilities:

• Assist with the development of bioinformatics pipelines to process omics data (as required for analysis, for example FASTQ to VCF).
• Perform testing and validation of Origin’s suite of bioinformatics pipelines.
• Perform technical analysis to evaluate data quality and work closely with the lab team to optimise wet lab processes.
• Perform disease-association analysis for biomarker discovery.
• Develop and evaluate pre-processing methodologies used for diagnostic development workstreams.
• Validate analysis by considering results in their biological context.
• Ad hoc requests for data extracts from the laboratory and clinical teams.

Requirements

Skills & Qualification:

• PhD or Master’s degree, in Bioinformatics, Genetics, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, Computer Sciences or a relevant discipline.
• Experience in scientific programming, in particular python and/or R.
• Ability to create bioinformatics pipelines customised for each individual use case.
• Ability to summarise key results of analysis and communicate actionable outcomes.
• Ability to critically evaluate analytical methodologies and results in a commercial R&D environment.
• Understanding of data management best practices.

Desirable:

• Previous experience analysing cancer-associated signatures from NGS or sequencing-based methylation data.
• Experience with workflow languages, such as Nextflow.
• Experience working with data derived from clinical trial samples.
• Previous experience developing diagnostic products.
• Understanding of how to handle human genomics data in line with GDPR requirements.
• Git and version control.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday
• Pension contribution