Post-doctoral Training Fellow, Gene Function team

The Gene Function Laboratory focuses upon identifying and understanding tumour specific dependencies, such as synthetic lethal effects, as a means to design novel approaches to treating cancer. We have made major advances in identifying synthetic lethal interactions involving, for example, PARP inhibitors (Farmer et al Nature (2005), Edwards et al Nature (2008), Bajrami et al, Cancer Research (2014), ATR inhibitors (Williamson et al, Nature Communications (2016)) and ROS1 inhibitors (Bajrami et al, Cancer Discovery (2018)). We aim to generate pre-clinical information that can inform the design of clinical trials and the identification of novel targets for drug discovery programmes.

We are seeking a creative and motivated Postdoctoral Training Fellow to study the emergence, prevention and treatment of PARP inhibitor resistance in breast and ovarian cancer. PARP inhibitor resistance can emerge via a number of routes, but the most well-described clinical mechanism is via reversion mutations that restore the function of BRCA1/2 (Pettitt et al., Cancer Discovery 2020; reversions.icr.ac.uk). The successful candidate will study whether new protein sequence that arises in these mutations could potentially be targeted using immunotherapy and/or vaccination approaches. This will make use of human and mouse T-cell priming assays, novel mouse models available in the group, clinical samples from breast and ovarian cancer patients with reversion mutations and mass-spectrometry based approaches. This will be an interdisciplinary project carried out between the Gene Function laboratory (PI Prof. Chris Lord), The Breast Cancer Now Research Unit at King’s College London (PI Prof. Andrew Tutt), and Translational Immunotherapy (PI Prof. Alan Melcher). This is an exciting opportunity for candidates to develop expertise in new areas and work on a project with high clinical relevance. Experience with immunology, mouse genetics or DNA repair biology would be an advantage, but there are opportunities to learn in all of these areas.

This position is offered on a fixed term 2 year contract. Starting salary is in the range of £32,844* to £41,718 per annum inclusive based on previous postdoctoral experience.
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