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 more resources on patients with 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 to assist with process validation. The Bioinformatician will play a pivotal role in optimising sample and data processing, and validating bioinformatic pipelines.

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 (for example FASTQ to VCF).
• Implement testing for Origin’s suite of bioinformatics pipelines.
• Validate pipelines in the context of each individual use case.
• Optimise pipelines for high throughput processing
• Perform technical analysis to evaluate data quality and work closely with the lab team to optimise wet lab processes.
• Perform analysis to investigate the technical limitations of methodology
• Provide bioinformatics input to R&D projects
• Document analysis to assist with design history and commercialisation.
• 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 with Nextflow workflow language.
• Ability to create bioinformatics pipelines customised for each individual use case.
• Experience in scientific programming, in particular python and/or R.
• 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:

• Experience implementing unit tests to bioinformatics pipelines.
• Previous experience analysing cancer-associated signatures from NGS or sequencing-based methylation data.
• 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 UK GDPR requirements.
• Git and version control.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday
• Pension contribution