Position Summary
Cellares is seeking an innovative and highly motivated Platform Scientist with expertise across cellular biology, process engineering and technology development to join the Process Development team. This individual will interface across many parts of the company and contribute significantly to the development of our advanced cell therapy manufacturing platform.
The primary focus of this position is to serve as a conduit between biology and engineering teams in order to help design and test new hardware, software and infrastructure. The goal of this design-build-test-learn cycle will be to enable the Process Development team to rapidly onboard and optimize cell therapy manufacturing processes, while providing key insights to Engineering teams regarding future iterations of Cell Shuttle technologies.
The ideal candidate will be a strong technical contributor and cross-functional collaborator with demonstrated experience with cell culture, phenotypic enrichment/selection and/or genetic manipulation. Expertise within mechanical, software and/or systems engineering would further position candidates to succeed in this role.
Candidates should enjoy working in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment, and be prepared to tackle a broad range of challenges as the company grows.
Responsibilities
- Design and execute complex experiments using scientific principles and statistical approaches (DOE) to support the development of the Cellares platform
- Interface internally and cross-functionally with Systems Engineering, Controls Engineering, Software Engineering and Product teams to design, build and test new technologies relevant to process onboarding and Cell Shuttle infrastructure
- Author high-quality technical documents, procedures, and reports
- Analyze and present technical results at departmental meetings
- Become quickly adept at identifying current bottlenecks and opportunities through hands-on independent and collaborative investigations
- Perform routine laboratory activities including equipment qualification and maintenance
- Gather and review system requirements, develop robust test plans, oversee and support execution of experiments
- Develop training materials for scientific methods and techniques, train and onboard new hires as relevant
- Serve as subject matter expert where appropriate for cell therapy process technology improvements, and represent Process Development as needed
Requirements
- Bachelor's, Master's or PhD in Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Biology, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering or related field with 0-15 years of process development experience in the cell and gene therapy field
- Familiarity working on a GMP and/or Clinical Manufacturing preferred but not required
- Extensive experience designing scale-up or scale-down experiments and troubleshooting semi-automated instruments
- Hands-on experience with aspects of cell therapy manufacturing process preferred (cell culture, gene editing, magnetic selection, etc.)
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills; able to interpret, summarize, and present scientific results in a clear, concise, accurate manner to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience with flow cytometry and cell based assays preferred
- Strong understanding of cell biology and immunology
- Creative, self-motivated, eager to take on a wide variety of tasks and grow with the evolving technology
This is Cellares
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) and takes an Industry 4.0 approach to mass manufacturing the living drugs of the 21st century. The company is both developing and operating integrated technologies for cell therapy manufacturing to accelerate access to life-saving cell therapies. The company’s Cell Shuttle integrates all the technologies required for the entire manufacturing process in a flexible and high-throughput platform that delivers true walk-away, end-to-end automation. Cell Shuttles will be deployed in Cellares’ Smart Factories around the world to meet total patient demand for cell therapies at global scale. Partnering with Cellares enables academics, biotechs, and pharma companies to accelerate drug development and scale out manufacturing, lower process failure rates, lower manufacturing costs, and meet global patient demand.
The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, California with its commercial-scale IDMO Smart Factory in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The company is backed by world-class investors and has raised over $355 million in financing.
Leveling will be based on overall experience, education, and demonstration of knowledge throughout the interview process.
What We Do
Cellares is revolutionizing cell therapy manufacturing. We are developing a one-of-a-kind solution, The Cell Shuttle, to overcome the challenges associated with manufacturing so these life-saving therapies are affordable and widely available to patients who can benefit.
The clinical impact of cell therapy in treating cancer has been proven, but this therapeutic approach has several limitations, especially in manufacturing, leaving extremely sick patients waiting for treatment and desperate for hope.
Since cell therapy is currently produced for a single patient at a time, it is expensive to manufacture, requiring significant time and resources, and is difficult to scale.
Preclinical and clinical scientists, as well as commercial cell therapy manufacturers also lack the options to fully automate their manufacturing process quickly, safely, cost-effectively and at the scale they need.
The Cell Shuttle is an automated and closed end-to-end manufacturing solution that is flexible and scalable, enabling customers to run exact processes specified for their cell therapy. Compared with the current manual manufacturing processes for cell therapy, the Cell Shuttle’s next-generation automated manufacturing solution has 10 times the scalability (meaning 10 times more patient doses can be produced simultaneously), enables a three-fold reduction in process failure rates and will reduce the per-patient manufacturing cost by up to 70 percent for most processes.
