The Open Targets team at our 10 year anniversary celebration in October 2024
Join our team!
Open Targets is based on the stunning Wellcome Genome Campus, home to some of the world's foremost institutes and organisations in genomics and computational biology. We work in dynamic teams at the interface of academic and pharma industry science on a crucial problem, how to be more successful in making drugs. Working with us, you will be exposed to new technologies and a dynamic set of scientists dedicated to translational research.
Our posts are usually in either one of our academic partners, The Wellcome Sanger Institute or EMBL-EBI and have terms and conditions associated with the employer.
Important note: applications may be reviewed on an ongoing basis and the advertised post(s) may be filled before the stated deadline.
Advanced Research Assistant
Application closing date: 25 June 2025
Join Open-IBD, a multidisciplinary project applying single cell genomics to cells isolated from patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or healthy individuals, for a 2 year fixed term contract. Open-IBD aims to provide a deep muti-omic characterisation of early stage IBD in a large cohort of 1000 newly diagnosed patients to nominate causal factors driving IBD pathology and identify biomarkers of long- term outcomes in IBD, including disease progression and drug response.
This is a laboratory-based role in Carl Anderson’s group. You will liaise with clinical teams around UK on the acquistion of human tissue/blood samples and assist with processing these for single cell omics assays. Training for SOPs will be provided but experience in handing human tissue and isolation of PBMCs and plasma from human blood samples, and experience in working with large scale data and maintain accurate records is necessary.
Principal/Senior Data Scientist
Application closing date: 6 July 2025
Deliver a project at the intersection of machine learning and biology, as part of a two year fixed term contract. The project aims to leverage internal datasets and publicly available data from human cells to create foundational models for cellular biology predicting cellular behaviours in response to different perturbations, to enhance our understanding of life’s rules and improving health for all.
Your role will involve designing foundational models leveraging multi-modal readouts. This includes integrating and processing data from various sources to develop robust and versatile AI models. To achieve this, you will work with open-source software, proposing, developing, and maintaining new solutions to analyse and interpret large-scale single-cell datasets. We have access to unique data and are also in the position to generate data to train unique models. Additionally, we have substantial computational power and GPU resources to train large models efficiently.
Senior Postdoctoral Fellow/Postdoctoral Fellow
Application closing date: 8 July 2025
Join the Lotfollahi Group, an interdisciplinary team of ML researchers, computational biologists, clinicians and experimentalists, for a 3 year postdoctoral Fellow contract. Our mission is to develop data-driven and biologically grounded AI tools for decoding complex cellular systems.
As part of an Open Targets project, you will apply foundational model development and cutting-edge data analysis to real-world problems in drug discovery and target identification. These projects are conducted in close collaboration with leading pharmaceutical companies, bridging academic research and practical industry applications. This is a unique chance to gain experience in translational bioinformatics, building tools and models directly relevant to therapeutic development.
We welcome applications from diverse technical and scientific backgrounds — from those interested in fundamental questions in biology and medicine, to those focused on ML/AI method development. We are particularly excited to work with individuals who are passionate about biology, foundation model development, modeling cellular perturbation responses, predicting patient behaviors, and analyzing multi-modal biological data.