Postdoctoral position(s) in adaptive immunity in cancer (up to 2)

Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research?

The Center for Cellular Cancer Therapy (C3T), Karolinska Institutet (KI), is a research constellation funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council following a call for national for Centers of Research Excellence. We encompass basic, translational, and clinical principal investigators with a focus on understanding and improving cellular immunotherapies against cancer, with a particular focus on solid tumors. Our overall aim is to expand competence and create an international competitive platform at KI within the rapidly developing field of living drugs against cancer.

For two of our research groups, we are seeking postdoctoral candidates:

Yenan Bryceson: Expertise in cytotoxic lymphocyte differentiation and function, transcriptional regulation of lymphocyte tissue-residency

Antonino Cassotta: Expertise in antigen-specific human T cells, antigen presentation, T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing, and genome editing of human T cells.

You will be working in an international and interdisciplinary research environment, where collaborative efforts are encouraged and your development to scientific independence will be fostered. Within C3T we constitute a multi-disciplinary group of experimentalists, lab technicians, computational biologists, developers, PhD students and researchers of various background. We always aim for an open and creative environment. The research groups are based within different research constellations at Karolinska Institutet, but will foster collaboration through regular events and yearly workshops. You will have access to state-of-the art molecular biology, cell culture, animal husbandry, flow cytometry, and imaging facilities.

To build a strong and creative research team, we are looking for high achievers from universities around the world. We will offer an intellectually stimulating environment with prominent guest researchers and we look for talented people who will play a part in developing our next breakthrough ideas. Our aim is to promote independent researchers that will build their careers in science.

Your mission

Our vision is to utilize insights from cytotoxic lymphocyte biology and tissue-residency to improve cellular immunotherapy of solid tumors. Our teams have recently published high-impact publications on comparative T cell differentiation markers (Zwijnenburg et al., Immunity 2023) and mechanisms of tissue-resident cytotoxic CD8+ T cell differentiation associated with tumor control (Zitti et al., Immunity 2023). We have developed CAR-T cell models of solid tumors, including ovarian cancer (Schoutrop et al., Cancer Res 2021; Schoutrop et al., JITC 2023), and identified γδ T cell subsets associated with tumor cell responses (Foord et al., Sci Trans Med 2021). We have optimized sensitive screening methods for the high-throughput isolation of antigen-specific T cells targeting naturally processed peptides from patients (Cassotta et al., Nature Medicine 2019) and pipelines for in-depth characterization of their TCR sequences, cognate epitopes, and MHC restriction (Low, ..., Sallusto*, Cassotta*, Science 2021), that can inform novel cancer immunotherapies.

Within our C3T consortium, we are now seeking postdoctoral candidates to work on:

• 1) Evaluating the potential of human T cell editing and transcriptional rewiring for improved cellular immunotherapy of solid tumors (Yenan Bryceson group)

• 2) Characterization of the TCR repertoire and phenotype of tumor-reactive T cells to elucidate mechanisms of cancer immune evasion (Antonino Cassotta team)

In your application, we kindly ask you to motivate which project you would be most interested to work in.

We aim to recruit an independent and motivated person who can set up and maintain workflows by implementing or adapting existing tools. Methods will include cell culture, genetic manipulation and engineering, advanced flow cytometry and sorting, (single-cell) RNA-seq, functional analyses, and animal experiments. Your efforts aim to identify and experimentally validate new approaches for improved cellular therapy of advanced solid cancers.

Your profile

To be eligible for employment as a postdoctoral researcher, a PhD or a foreign degree deemed to be equivalent to a Swedish PhD is required. This eligibility requirement must be fulfilled at the latest at the time of the employment decision. Completion of your doctoral degree within the last three years is considered an advantage. If there are special reasons, your degree may have been completed earlier.

The applicant must have a strong scientific background with relevant expertise, e.g. in molecular biology, cell culture, modification, and differentiation as well as advanced analyses methods. Interests in programming, computational biology, and statistics as well as experience in high-throughput sequence and gene expression data analysis is considered a merit.

Required skills:

• At least one first-author publication in a recognized peer-reviewed journal
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with human cell culture, cell sorting, and advanced flow cytometry
• Proficiency in molecular biology techniques (e.g. PCR, molecular cloning)
• Good knowledge of immunology and immunotherapy of cancer
• Extensive experience with methods relevant to cellular immunotherapy of cancer Excellent communication skills and motivation to work collaboratively 
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple projects in parallel
• Proficiency in spoken and written English  

Desirable skills:

• Hands-on experience in culturing and engineering of human primary T cells
• Experience with TCR repertoire analysis and (single-cell) RNA sequencing
• Experimental knowledge of immunological methods (e.g. ELISA)
• Hands-on experience with animal models of cancer
• Experience with viral vector for cell transduction Experience with CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing 
• Knowledge in R and foundations of statistics 
• Knowledge in Linux environment and at least one programming language, such as Java
• Familiarity with tools for workflows and software development such as GitHub 

What do we offer?

We can offer a 2-year position with possibilities for prolongation.

A creative and inspiring environment with wide-ranging expertise and interests. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. At Karolinska Institutet, we conduct successful medical research and hold the largest range of medical education in Sweden. At KI, you get to meet researchers working with a wide range of specialisms and methods, giving you ample opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with the various scientific fields within medicine and health. It is the crossover collaborations, which have pushed KI to where it is today, at the forefront of global research. Several of the people you meet in healthcare are educated at KI. A close relationship with the health care providers is important for creating groundbreaking top quality education and research. Karolinska Institutet is also a state university, which entitles you to several benefits through our collective agreement.

Location: Flemingsberg/ Solna

Application

Applications must contain the following documents in English:

• A maximum one-page cover letter summarizing motivation for the position and the project, previous experience, and research interests.
• A complete curriculum vitae of current work and work history.
• A complete list of publications with any shared authorships clearly indicated.
• Names and contact details of three references who are familiar with the applicant’s recent research and training

The application is to be submitted through the Varbi recruitment system.

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