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Job Title: INDUSTRIAL PHD STUDENT – SMALL MOLECULE THERAPEUTICS

Location: Zurich – Switzerland

Department: Others

Job description

We seek an enthusiastic PhD student for an industrial doctorate program on drug discovery (Small Molecule Therapeutics research unit). Our focus is the discovery of small molecules against targets of pharmaceutical interest. The PhD candidate will apply DNA-encoded chemical libraries to identify new hits, followed by the design, synthesis and purification of small molecules using standard and advanced organic synthetic procedures. The candidate will also perform hit validation (i.e., Fluorescence polarisation, Biacore, small molecule ELISA and/or enzymatic assays) to evaluate the biological activity of the synthesised compounds. Potentially, the PhD candidate will proceed with the most promising hits to test in vitro (cellular assays) and in vivo activity (e.g., in murine models of cancer).

This program will be carried out in Zurich laboratories in collaboration with a European University. The student will be trained to:

• Design, plan and implement scientific projects related to the R&D drug discovery program associated with our DNA-Encoded Chemical Library (DECL) Technology.

• Give scientific presentations.

• Write scientific articles and publish on peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Minimum requirements

• Master Degree in chemistry, medicinal chemistry, or related disciplines.

• Experience in synthesis (small organic ligands and/or peptide chemistry; bioconjugation chemistry is considered as a plus) and characterisation of organic compounds.

• Experience with modern analytic techniques (HPLC, LC-MS) and interpretation of results obtained by spectroscopic techniques (NMR).

• Good knowledge of data analysis and editing Software (i.e., Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Prism, R, MatLab, Illustrator).

• Experience in performing literature searches using chemistry databases (PubMed, SciFinder, Reaxys) and in applying the results to solve synthetic challenges in the lab.

• Fluency in oral and written English.

Applications need to include the candidate’s CV, a letter of motivation and 2 reference letters.

If you are interested, please send your application to samuele.cazzamalli@philochem.ch

Who we are

Philogen is a Swiss-Italian integrated biotechnology company founded in 1996, with the mission to develop innovative biopharmaceuticals for targeted therapy (http://www.philogen.com). Philochem AG is the R&D department of Philogen and it is located in Zurich. Philogen-Siena focuses on product optimisation/production according to GMP standards and on clinical trial investigations.

Interested candidates are kindly asked to send their Curriculum Vitae to the following e-mail address jobopportunities@philogen.it, specifying the job position of interest authorizing the process of personal data under Italian Legislative Decree 196/03 and General Data Protection EU Regulation (2016/679).