Job Openings in the Lab for Antiviral Drug Discovery

[mattodd]

As part of a $65M NIH grant towards new direct acting antivirals, seven posts are available in my group at UCL in central London:

Four synthetic chemistry postdocs https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CXH065 One protein science postdoc https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CXH076 One Project Manager (not lab based, would particularly suit medicinal chemist with project management experience from industry) https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CXH100 One Laboratory Manager https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CXH049

The team, working closely with colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, constitutes the Medicinal Chemistry Core of the READDI-AViDD consortium that aims to improve our preparedness through the design and validation of small molecule binders of proteins from viruses of pandemic potential. Open science governs both the Medchem Core and the Discovery Core (headed by Cheryl Arrowsmith in Toronto), and we will work with our extended partners (including Janssen and Takeda) to translate these molecules into inexpensive therapeutics.

Funding is secured to April 2025, with the possibility of extension for a further two years.

Closing date for all applications is Feb 28th. Start dates: ASAP.

Informal queries can be sent to me at matthew.todd@ucl.ac.uk.

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Just on a personal note, this is a really exciting initiative:

1) It's important, interesting, enabling research, since we're going after novel and under-studied proteins.
2) It's a great team, involving Tim Willson and Ralph Baric as consortium leads at UNC, but a host of other excellent researchers at UNC and beyond.
3) It's all open science, meaning everything the medchem and discovery cores touch is public domain.

We've already gotten started with a SARS-CoV-2 Nsp13 project over at https://github.com/StructuralGenomicsConsortium/CNP4-Nsp13-C-terminus-B and are at the exciting stage of having novel hits vs protein to explore. The above roles will allow a huge expansion of the effort, against diverse other targets. We're particularly well supported at UCL to do this kind of research, and in my dept at the School of Pharmacy we invested, in 2022, £2M in new high throughput NMR and MS systems precisely to enable faster analysis of protein-small molecule interactions. In 2023 we obtained a new Creoptix Wave, to, which will be very useful throughout the project.

So come and join the team! The synthetic chemistry postdocs will drive the day-to-day (compound synthesis, design and puchase), the protein science postdoc will work on establishing and running suitable biophysical and enzymatic assays, the lab manager will keep everything ship shape and the project manager will oversee all activities in concert with the Chapel Hill team. There's money for regular travel to meet with the rest of the consortium. Full JDs are in the above links.

And you'd be working alongside the existing group - this lovely collection of talented people:

[mattodd]

Also advertised on Nature Jobs

[mattodd]

Team in place!