Researcher in antibody molecular engineering

The Molecular Engineering Services for Health (SIMoS) is part of the CEA's "Medicines and Technologies for Health" department. SIMoS specialises in the development and characterisation of molecules for diagnosis, imaging and therapy, particularly antibodies. The Cellular Immunology and Biotechnology Laboratory (LICB) is developing antibody engineering and epitope mapping methods based on the Yeast Surface Display technique.

Many innovative therapies and diagnostic systems are based on the use of monoclonal antibodies. A large proportion of these molecules are obtained by immunising animals, so their characteristics are highly dependent on the quality of the animals' immune responses. Their affinity may be insufficient or their recognition spectrum poorly controlled. Alternatives for generating antibodies in vitro exist and involve screening synthetic libraries to rapidly identify new molecules with the desired affinity and selectivity properties.

The aim of this post is to implement in vitro antibody generation technologies at SIMoS that do not use animals but synthetic immunoglobulin libraries.

Job description

Within the CEA, SIMoS is recruiting a permanent contract researcher in Molecular Engineering of Antibodies and Molecular Biology to strengthen its research activity in the discovery of new antibodies for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes. The objectives of this post are i) to create synthetic libraries of human immunoglobulins and nanobodies (VHH) with controlled diversity and ii) to exploit the libraries generated to develop new molecules of interest for the laboratory's projects, directed against pathogens of emerging diseases or the terrorist threat, as well as against other targets of therapeutic or diagnostic interest. Finally, the aim is also to iii) develop original research as part of an overall strategy to generate antibodies or nanobodies with high affinity and controlled selectivity.