Scientist ML/AI for small molecule invention

Permanent scientist positions in machine learning and AI for small molecule profiling and design

Janssen Research & Development seeks to drive innovation and deliver transformational medicines for the treatment of diseases in six therapeutic areas: neuroscience, cardiovascular diseases and metabolism, infectious diseases, immunology, oncology and pulmonary hypertension. In these areas, Janssen aims to address and solve unmet medical needs through the development of small and large molecules, as well as vaccines. The Janssen campus in Beerse (Belgium) has a unique ecosystem covering the complete drug development life cycle, with all capabilities from basic science to market access on one campus. The integrated environment of our campus gives our people the chance to experience many different aspects of drug development throughout their career. It has a successful track record of over sixty years of drug discovery and development and is one of the most important innovation engines of the Janssen group worldwide.

Developing innovative therapeutics to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, various types of cancers and infectious diseases like Hepatitis B, influenza is our passion. In this endeavor, we are seeking to recruit new talent for the comprehensive analyses of high-dimensional datasets using state-of-the-art data science methods applied to drug discovery programs. These two scientist positions will be opened on the Beerse campus, which is the flagship R&D center for small molecules within Janssen, investing over 1 billion euros each year in R&D.

POSITIONS SUMMARY

These positions frame in the ongoing virtualization of parts of the research process. The successful candidate will join a team of multiple PhD level data scientists who introduce large scale machine learning and artificial intelligence to leverage the extensive datasets accessible to the company. Accessible datasets include chemical descriptions and annotations of desired and undesired biological activities for millions of small molecules across thousands of assays, and information-rich but hard-to-interpret documentation of small molecules like microscopy images or transcriptomics profiles acquired at high throughput (hundreds of thousands of profiles in each of several assays). In addition, dozens of millions of chemical reactions can be mined. The goal is the selection and design of small molecules to make and test en route to better and safer drugs for patients with unmet medical needs.

The scientists will design, initiate, drive and execute projects to improve Janssen’s ability to predict the biological activity of small molecules and their reactivity in chemical reactions to form new compounds. They will demonstrate added value to drug discovery of the resulting approaches by their application to portfolio projects. The successful candidates will have their own lines of research and collaborate with pioneer external labs on approaches to unlock and combine new types of internal and external data and to learn from them. Moreover, the scientists will translate of the evolving technologies into concrete and actionable recommendations for research biologists and medicinal chemists in support of the small molecule project portfolio from hit identification to lead optimization. Finally, the scientists will interact with R&D IT, statistics and computational chemistry colleagues to facilitate the maturation from proof-of-concept implementations that demonstrate value addition to the discovery process into robust enterprise-grade solutions that are broadly accessible by stakeholders.

The successful candidates will be responsible for:

• coordinating the design, development, internalization and combination of state-of-the-art machine learning methods to select and design small molecules to make and or test
• encourage the formulation new and creative ways of unlocking information from accessible data sources and theoretical concepts
• ensure the application of the resulting capabilities to support portfolio projects
• emphasize the translation of questions of biologists and chemists to a quantitative analysis formulation
• interaction with R&D informatics to make proof-of-concept solutions robustly accessible to users, with visualization solutions
• interaction and coordination with counterparts from computational chemistry, drug metabolism and pharmacodynamics and toxicology to account for their insights and needs
• incentivize team contributions to peer-reviewed papers and presentations at relevant conferences