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.
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.
Postdoctoral Fellow in computational modelling of NeuroImmune Mechanisms of Neurodegeneration
Application closing date: 20 July 2025
Develop and apply integrative computational pipelines to dissect immune-cell phenotypes and cell–cell interactions across Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patient tissues and matched induced pluripotent stem cells models.
As part of this role, you will analyze large-scale single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets from human brain samples to identify shared multi-cellular pathological features, build and apply statistical and machine-learning methods to infer cell-cell signaling networks and causal drivers, develop pipelines to compare patient-derived data with hiPSC-derived models, identifying recapitulated phenotypes and candidate intervention targets, and supervise junior team members.
Postdoctoral Fellow: Neurodegenerative Disease Spatial Transcriptomics and Machine Learning
Application closing date: 27 July 2025
Join the Bayraktar and Lotfollahi labs at the Wellcome Sanger Institute to apply cutting edge machine learning models to large-scale single cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets of neurodegenerative diseases. Supported by Open Targets, you will have access to novel cell atlassing datasets of patient tissue samples and close collaborators in biology and machine learning. This position is for a 3 year contract.
You will join a new project to create comparative cell atlases of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). You will work with a close group of wet and dry lab collaborators to analyse single nuclei and Xenium spatial transcriptomics datasets from brain tissue over 200 patients. You will use state-of-the-art machine learning models to integrate multi-modal data, identify disease vulnerable cell types and pathological cell interactions, with a focus on spatial data analysis.
Technical Specialist: Neurodegenerative Disease Spatial Transcriptomics and Data Generation
Application closing date: 27 July 2025
Join the Bayraktar lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute to generate large-scale spatial transcriptomic datasets of neurodegenerative diseases.
You will join a new project to create comparative cell atlases of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). You will work with a close group of wet and dry lab collaborators to generate Xenium spatial transcriptomics datasets from brain tissue over 200 patients. Your role will initially focus on tissue handling and optimisation of spatial data generation, including a combination of Xenium with high multiplexed protein imaging. The role will subsequently expand to supervise and coordinate single cell and spatial transcriptomic data generation in the project, with support from your line manager.