Turnstone Biologics (“Turnstone”), a privately held clinical stage biotech company, is developing breakthrough cancer immunotherapies by advancing two leading and complementary platforms that drive innate and adaptive tumor immunity, to provide benefit to the millions of cancer patients underserved by current treatment options. Turnstone’s proprietary vaccinia virus platform is engineered to drive coordinated immune activation, potent viral activity, and local expression of encoded therapeutics. The innovative TIL cell therapy platform leverages clinically validated treatment protocols and has been specifically designed to extend beyond the use of bulk TILs to enrich for the most relevant T-cells for tumor eradication, preserving broad antigen diversity and minimizing time to treatment for patients. The Company has an ongoing Phase 1/2a trial in solid tumors (RAPTOR) for its leading oncolytic virus candidate, RIVAL-01, and is expecting to file an IND for the lead TIL therapy candidate, TIDAL-01, in 2021. 

 

At Turnstone, the science drives decision-making and our therapeutics are designed with the patient foremost in mind. We continue to build a world-class, high-performing company that embraces being a learning organization with a sense of urgency. Imagine coming to work every day where over-communication, transparency, teaching, listening, asking, thinking, working hard, and having fun are normal – actually, expected? Imagine having a coach, mentor, peers, and partners where candid feedback, self-improvement, risk taking, failing, learning from that failing, and succeeding thereafter are what we call ‘another day at Turnstone’? If you are a passionate person, and our science excites you – this opportunity may be for you.

 

 Position Overview:

This role is part of the Computational Sciences team parting with the Translational Medicine Biomarker team to build and utilize big-data platforms to analyze preclinical, translational, and clinical data. This is a hands-on technical role in which you will aggregate patient clinical data and biomarker data (bulk and single cell NGS and TCRseq, multiplexed flow cytometry, pathology, functional immunology, and proteomic data) to assist in the identification of relevant biomarkers as well as to generate hypotheses that will define and drive the next generation of oncology therapies.

The responsibilities for this role include:

  • Manage and evolve global data platforms for clinical and multidimensional correlative data and integrate and analyze such data to understand and define predictive biomarkers, mechanisms of action, mechanism of resistance and disease selection so to drive our optimal clinical development as well as discovery efforts.
  • Design and implement computational bioinformatic methodologies to analyze and interpret data from a wide variety of sources including clinical data, external literature, high throughput genomic data, multidimensional pathology data, flow cytometry, functional immune and proteomic data.
  • Utilize APIs, data exploration and visualization tools as well as bioinformatics approaches to support discovery, pre-clinical and clinical studies including, but not limited to, informing new disease indications for our therapies, and developing predictive biomarkers
  • Collaborate with domain experts in privacy, security, and compliance to ensure that the R&D data platforms uphold privacy, security, and compliance requirements

 

Experience & Qualifications:

  • PhD or Master’s degree in bioinformatics, computer science, statistics, data science or a related field with a particular focus on data analysis.
  • This role will be positioned out of either site in San Diego or Ottawa
  • Willingness to travel (when it’s safe as it pertains to global pandemics) up to 10-30% to other Turnstone sites and/or external CMOs throughout North America (USA, Canada) and Europe
  • First-hand experience using patient clinical and biomarker data (proteomic, flow cytometry, pathology and genomic data-bulk and single cell NGS) in concert with preclinical and public NGS data to develop and support disease selection and biomarker strategies
  • 5 years of experience in life sciences, pharma or informatics industry working with clinical trials data, genomics, and biomarker data is preferred.
  • 5 years of hands-on experience of applying data science methods and tools to diverse problems using R and/or Python is preferred.
  • Expert programmer in at least one language, with experience working in production environments.
  • Experience with statistical analysis, bioinformatics/genomics tools (such as GATK, BEDtools, VCFtools, STAR aligner, DEseq, etc.), data visualization, and databases
  • Working understanding of innate and adaptive immune systems is preferred
  • Experience with data analysis – RNA-Seq, single cell analysis, flow cytometry, variant calling
  • Experience with existing and upcoming machine learning methods (supervised and unsupervised) in pharmaceutical data analysis
  • Collaborative development skills using version control systems (e.g., Git)
  • Familiarity with using virtualized working environments such as Docker
  • Proven ability to work in a matrix environment is preferred
  • Comfortable in a dynamic environment with competing priorities
  • Strong communication both written and spoken
  • Strong interpersonal skills and a communication style that matches the Turnstone style: respectful, transparent, and constant


Turnstone Biologics welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. We thank all applicants for their interest, however, only those selected will be invited for an interview

 


This position has been filled. Would you like to see our other open positions?