Principal Bioinformatician

About the role:

The CRUK National Biomarker Centre (NBC) has an international reputation for liquid biomarkers, with the aim to develop, validate and implement biomarkers that facilitate cancer precision medicine through improved cancer detection, prognosis prediction, and prediction and monitoring of patient response to therapy. Our research integrates clinical, molecular and computational science into a highly convergent programme, with advanced computational biology playing a critical role in our biomarker agenda.

An exciting opportunity now presents for a Principal Bioinformatician to join the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (BBS) Team within NBC. You will work alongside a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, statisticians, bioinformaticians and computational scientists to analyse genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic data arising from patient samples; including cell-free DNA and RNA (cfDNA, cfRNA), single cell data and circulating cancer-associated cells.

The primary focus will be to further develop already established computational approaches for detecting and analysing tumour signals in liquid biopsies. This will include the analysis of a range of multiomic data (DNA methylation, RNA-seq, fragmentomics) using computational statistics and machine learning/AI approaches. This work will require collaboration across a wide range of studies involving early detection of cancer, monitoring of treatment response, molecular chararterisation of tumours and detection of treatment-related toxicity.

This is an unique opportunity to work in an translational and collaborative team and develop data analytics bespoke to the intersect of research and the clinic.

About you:

You should have a PhD in Computational Biology/Bioinformatics, Mathematics/Statistics (or a related discipline) or have a relevant postgraduate degree in one of the above (or a related discipline) along with significant relevant experience. You will have significant experience in writing code in R and/or Python for robust and reproducible analysis and demonstrable experience in many areas of bioinformatics pertaining to the processing and/or analysis of high-throughput data. An understanding of liquid biopsies, cancer genomics, and cancer biology are desirable, as is experience in machine learning and developing bioinformatics pipelines (e.g., Nextflow).

You will have excellent communication skills to converse successfully with interdisciplinary collaborators from non-mathematical backgrounds. Experience of multidisciplinary teamwork would be beneficial.

Why choose Cancer Research UK National Biomarker Centre?

The Cancer Research UK National Biomarker Centre is a leading and highly specialised translational research centre within The University of Manchester (www.manchester.ac.uk), core funded by Cancer Research UK (www.cancerresearchuk.org ), the largest independent cancer research organisation in the world.

Our Centre discovers, develops, validates and qualifies biomarkers in clinical studies and trials that detect cancer earlier and predict and monitor therapy responses to support optimised treatment of patients with cancer. Our advanced research programmes, agnostic to cancer type, develop biomarkers in tissue and less invasive clinical samples such as blood (liquid biopsy) with sophisticated bioinformatic and artificial intelligence solutions for multi-modal laboratory and clinical biomarker data analysis and interpretation. Our preclinical programmes focus on development of pharmacodynamic biomarker and evaluation the efficacy of novel therapeutics in patient derived models. As a bridge between discovery science and clinical research, we are highly collaborative across Manchester, nationally and internationally.

For any informal enquiries about this post, please contact Dr Dominic Rothwell: dominic.rothwell@cruk.manchester.ac.uk

The deadline for receipt of applications is Sunday 5 May 2024.

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