Scientist Lead Discovery/HTS

Job Responsibilities
We are seeking a Scientist to work in a Lead Discovery group to support drug discovery efforts for various therapeutic targets in the epigenetic field.

The scientist will develop, optimize, validate and execute biochemical and cellular assays to support small molecule drug discovery projects. Primary responsibilities include assay development, automation, and running of screening assays, and characterization of small molecule leads in support of structure activity relationship studies.

The scientist will be involved in all aspects of the screening process from compound management to reporting data. Additionally, the scientist may also participate in protein purification projects in order to supply enzymes and substrates for screening.

Qualifications
The position requires an enzymologist/biochemist with experience in biochemical and/or cell based assay development, in addition to HTS screening experience. A Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry/Chemistry/Biology with 2 to 3 years industrial experience is required.

The following experience/qualifications are preferred: an enzymologist with drug discovery experience; work with fluorescence based assay formats such as Homogeneous Time Resolved Fluorescence (HTRF), as well as radio labeled based assay formats such as Flashplate; and direct experience with using Mass Spectrometry for solving scientific problems is a plus.

Mission
The company seeks to become the premier chromatin therapeutics company through the discovery and development of novel drugs targeting selective regulators of epigenetic function. An initial focus will be the development of new cancer therapies through the discovery of inhibitors targeting histone post translational modifications (PTMs) and their function.

Cancer is a disease of many cellular abnormalities that collectively confer a heritable and selectable advantage for cells to proliferate. Unfortunately, an inherent challenge of developing effective cancer therapeutics lies with the difficulty of accurately discerning those select targets that are essential for cancer cell survival from the multitude of gene expression alterations whose abnormal expression correlates with, but does not cause, the cancer phenotype. An effective strategy for validating "causal" targets for drug development is to focus on tumor-associated specific and recurrent genomic alterations such as DNA mutations, chromosomal translocations, and gene amplifications.