Ph.D. Studentships in Bioinformatics Available in the Martin Lab
Analysis and prediction of antibody stability and B-cell epitopes
BBSRC/CASE STUDENTSHIP WITH UCB ATTRACTING AN ENHANCED STIPEND
An Industrial CASE PhD studentship with UCB is available in the Research Group of Dr. Andrew C.R. Martin. The project will focus on two key areas related to use of antibodies as biopharmaceuticals, both of which have an impact on immunogenicity, a major concern of the regulatory authorities: (i) understanding & predicting stability, (ii) helping to predict immunogenicity by identifying B-cell epitopes (BCEs). The aim is to develop novel computational methods to allow the production of more effective biopharmaceutical therapeutics.
We will develop machine learning methods to exploit recent work in the group on germline pairing preferences together with other predictions and antibody sequence and stability data available at UCB, to attempt to predict stability. Second we will attempt to predict immunodominant BCEs in the context of 3D structure by adapting methods recently developed in the lab for predicting protein-protein interaction sites.
The studentship is funded by the BBSRC and UCB for four years, starting October 2012. The Martin Group in the UCL Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB) participates in several Centres in computational biology at UCL and the work will be carried out in close collaboration with scientists at UCB. The student will benefit from the interdisciplinary nature of the ISMB as well as excellent computing facilities in the group and access to the UCL high performance Legion compute farm with over 5600 cores.
Full details are available here.
To apply please send an electronic copy of your CV to Dr. Andrew C.R. Martin - by 29th February, 2012.
