Project Overview

SMART CAMP (Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine) is a new interdisciplinary research programme in Singapore (CREATE international research campus and innovation hub) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). SMART CAMP addresses key technology bottlenecks in cell therapy manufacturing: (i) critical quality attributes of safe, effective cell therapy products; and (ii) integrated process analytics to monitor and modulate those attributes. While cell therapies are poised to transform healthcare for both the industry and the patient, there remain many outstanding scientific and technical challenges to significant global impact that this R&D programme addresses. This high-impact focus includes measurement and feedback control of processing parameters (process analytic technologies, or PAT) that contribute to cell viability and function during cell proliferation, and the measurement at intermediate and final steps of the cell product properties correlated with positive therapeutic outcomes (critical quality attributes, or CQA).

This interdisciplinary team comprises engineers, biologists, clinicians, manufacturing, and data analytics experts from multiple MIT academic units, and multiple Singapore-based universities, research centres of excellence, and hospitals who are experienced at translational demonstrations of technologies in safety-regulated industries such as cell therapies. As with all postdoctoral associates (PDAs) in SMART CAMP based in Singapore, the PDA will work in a diverse team of experts including several principal investigators (PIs) and PDAs, and receive direct mentorship regarding career development from a pair of who are based in Singapore and at MIT, respectively.

CAMP’s unique, enabling and cross-cutting capabilities include cell and clinical biology, microfluidics, real-time optics and spectroscopies, 3D-printed devices, process analytics, data analytics, and bioinformatics. This programme will demonstrate these approaches required of cell-based personalized medicine through three translational testbeds (three Flagship Projects), ultimately facilitating access for more patients to life-saving, approved cell therapies for currently intractable health challenges. These flagship projects will address allogeneic and autologous cell therapy products, including but not limited to cell sources including adult stem/progenitor cells and immune cells for treatment of specific cancers, tissue degeneration, and autoimmune diseases. This PDA is part of the core postdoctoral research team of CAMP, and will contribute his/her/their expertise to all three flagship projects as appropriate:

Flagship Project 1: Label-free critical quality attributes (CQA) for personalized efficacy of cell therapies, including multivariate analysis of biological and biophysical attributes

Flagship Project 2: Rapid critical quality attributes (CQA) for safety of cell sources & cell therapy products, including process analytic technologies (PAT)

Flagship Project 3: Integrated process analytic technologies (PAT) for cell proliferation and recovery, including in-line and intermittent monitoring to promote efficacy and safety CQA

Job Responsibilities

CAMP Core – Data analytics and bioinformatics

SMART CAMP research will address key bottlenecks in manufacturing therapeutic cells: critical quality attributes (CQA) of cells that elicit anticipated therapeutic response, and process analytic technologies (PAT) that monitor and maintain those attributes during cell expansion. This requires expertise in data analytics to identify correlates in high-dimensional datasets and to enable cell selection. Due to the various CQA and PAT involving large quantities of complex data, this PDA is one of two core positions of data scientists. This PDA contributes expertise in handling large datasets for in silico, in vitro, and in vivo experiments using bioinformatic approaches; the other core PDA contributes with expertise in artificial intelligence-based machine learning/deep learning-based data analytics enabling rapid image analysis. This core PDA will be collaborating with cell biologists, engineers and clinicians across all three CAMP flagship project teams to analyze datasets reflecting behavior of two important cell therapy candidate types: cartilage-repairing stem cells and cancer-killing immune cells. This PDA is responsible for establishing the data analytics workflow and pipelines of the core that focuses on data correlates and CQA identification; and for consulting and seeking input from CAMP colleagues to define, train and implement data projects that convert data to understanding that is amenable to CQA validation and PAT integration required of next-generation cell therapy production.

Job Requirements

• Ph.D. degree in computational biology, bioinformatics, applied statistics with biological cell -omic data, or a related field in the biological data sciences.
• Highly motivated candidate with experience in interdisciplinary data research, with outstanding skills and abilities in informatics, data curation, large scale multivariate data analysis, statistics and statistical model building, as evidenced by publications and presentations
• Demonstrated expertise in data analytics programming and pipelines – including experience in R or related languages for graphical representation, gene ontology pipelines, and customized image analysis scripts – is an expected asset.
• Excellent verbal and written English communication skills and desire to understand others problems and serve others are required.
• Excellent time management and organizational skills
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, and to work collaboratively in a team
• Self-motivated, independent, with superior organizational and analytical skills
• Good track record of publications and scientific output
• Able and committed to work in Singapore

Interested applicants are invited to send in their full CV/resume, cover letter and list of three references (to include reference names and contact information). We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.