Senior Bioinformatician (RNA Structure)

Senior Bioinformatician (RNA Structure)

Serna Bio is building the world’s first map of the druggable transcriptome, systematically opening up the universe of RNA biology to small molecule drug discovery. Using our Discovery Platform, we are tackling the classically intractable targets ranging from coding and non-coding RNA.

The Team You’ll Join

As a Senior bioinformatician at Serna Bio, you will be a key member of the computational biology team, working closely and cross-functionally with our biology, high throughput screening and engineering teams, primarily focussed on organizing data associated with RNA structure analysis.

Your work will inform and support our R&D projects and our therapeutic program progression. You’ll play a key role in the development of novel structure-based target ID work.

Key Responsibilities 

• Working closely with our CSO, Danny Incarnato, you’ll be building novel bioinformatics pipelines to progress our target ID platform which have a direct impact on our programs. 
• Taking ownership and managing our existing target ID platform and associated pipelines to enable identification of suitable regions in RNA to target.
• Using RNA structure prediction to understand RNA structure-function relationships
• Helping to develop computational pipelines for analyzing chemical probing experiments, such as SHAPE-MaP

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in Bioinformatics/ Computational Biology or related fields with 3+ years of industry experience.
• Demonstrated expertise working on RNA structure probing techniques and the data generated from them.
• Experience analyzing NGS data from chemical probing experiments, e.g. SHAPE-based chemical probing data, RNASeq or other complex datasets (CHIPSeq, RiboSeq etc).
• Expertise in Bioinformatics programming and scripting languages (Python, Perl, R).
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Positive team building and teamwork skills: an innate ability to collaborate at pace across domain boundaries

Preferred Qualifications

• The ideal candidate will have deep scientific and technical expertise in the following:
• Software development best practice, including agile, version control, unit / integration testing, documentation, and deployment
• Integrating genomics and transcriptomics datasets.
• FASTQ processing and Mapping tools
• Ability to manage multiple concurrent, fast-paced projects and to work with collaborators from both wet lab and dry lab
• Experience with RNA secondary structure prediction tools, e.g. RNAStructure, ViennaRNA, and LinearFold/LinearPartition
  
  

About Us

Serna Bio is a preclinical drug discovery company developing small molecules that can modulate translation and splicing, by targeting RNA. Founded in 2021, Serna Bio leverages the convergence of synthetic biology, machine learning (ML), and massively multiplex screening to tackle the historical challenges of drugging the RNA universe.

Our core innovation lies in the Serna Discovery Platform, which systematically maps RNA structures to a vast chemical universe, generating large proprietary datasets. The platform incorporates both experimental wet lab and AI capabilities.  We use our platform to tackle undruggable targets and novel biology inaccessible by classical drug discovery. 

The Values You’ll Share 

• The Data Decides: The future of drug discovery will be computationally led. Opinions are just hypotheses. The data rules.

• Unapologetic ambition: The work we do matters. We maximise its value by striving to make the biggest impact, fastest. We don’t take the easy path, or wait for lower risk. We show up with a plan. We define what victory looks like. We make our time count.

• We don’t rely on experience, we run the experiment: We are humble in the face of work that has never been done before. We never default to experience. We use what we already know to train the machines to outperform us.

• Only the highest standards: We are inspired by challenge. We work hard. Our efforts are guided by the utility of every failed experiment and the value of new learning. Metrics matter to us. Effort, integrity, honesty, execution, and excellence are what we owe each other.

• We are one company: We operate with a ‘company first, team second’ mentality. We learn from the perspectives of others. Our is an antedisciplinary idea meritocracy. Ego is valueless. Diverse perspectives, integrity, resilience and teamwork are priceless.

• High-density, high-frequency communication: We share Work in Progress. We offer and accept critical opinions on this work so that the final versions are excellent. We communicate clearly to enable rapid decision-making, and we bring solutions, not just problems to the team.