POSITION

At Roche, over 90,000 colleagues are working together and doing what patients need next.  Our ambition is to deliver novel therapeutics, diagnostic solutions and insights to patients with game changing clinical benefits. China Innovation Center of Roche is seeking for talented and experienced Scientists or Scientists for the discovery, design and engineering of novel antibody drugs. The final position offered depends the experience level of the candidate. The position requires the candidate to perform the engineering of antibodies through rational design, computational engineering or display technology. The successful candidate will work with dynamic and highly motivated teams to drive the development of antibody therapeutics for unmet medical needs. The candidate will collaborate with colleagues in Antibody discovery, Immunology, Oncology, Protein Sciences, Structural Biology, CADD, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and CMC. This position requires effective participation in multidisciplinary teams with members from CICoR.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Potentially act as project lead and collaborate with other cross-functional project leads in the design and execution of the program strategies and goals.
• Perform protein engineering to drive therapeutic antibody lead selection, design, and optimization for antibody discovery projects.
• Design and execute synthetic phage libraries for antibody optimization.
• Design and select fit for purpose antibody format.
• Develop cutting-edge computational tools in protein engineering.
• Coordinate with CROs and monitor outsourcing activities to ensure timely delivery of qualified data to steer portfolios.
• Participate in due diligence to evaluate relevant external opportunities in order to license in assets or technologies.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Qualification and experience

The candidate qualifications include a Ph.D. in a biological science, including at least 5 years of recent structural biology, computational biology/chemistry, protein engineering, preferably in a biotechnology or pharma setting.  A track record of effective protein engineering support of antibody generation and optimization efforts in drug discovery programs.

Competencies

The ideal candidate will have demonstrated competence in the following areas:

• Strong background in structure-based protein analysis and engineering. Experience with computational protein engineering, antibody paratope-epitope modeling, protein engineering to reduce immunogenicity, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) are vital.
• Deep understanding of display technologies and workflows.
• Expertise of cutting-edge biologics formats including bi- and multi-specific antibodies.
• Molecular biology skills and cell biology assay experience is a plus.
• Experience with cloud or high-performance computing (e.g. AWS, GCP) and AI/ML to model sequence and biological data is highly preferred.
• Solid record of accomplishments and publications as evidence of scientific knowledge. The proven ability to learn new techniques, to problem solve, and to have a sustained record of productivity.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills with a deep commitment to working as part of teams and recognizing the strengths of everyone on the team.