Research Scientist

Qubit Pharmaceuticals is accelerating drug discovery for challenging disease targets, including those currently viewed as being ‘undruggable’ using small molecules by the pharmaceutical community. It does so using proprietary molecular simulation and quantum-physics based modeling technology built from over 30 years of research from our academic founders.

Qubit’s approach uses a hybrid of classical and quantum computing approaches to produce more effective and safer drugs and is designed to significantly reduce the time and investment needed to discover new drug candidates by a factor of 10. In less than 18 months, Qubit Pharmaceuticals grew its drug discovery portfolio to 6 programs in oncology, inflammation & antivirals leveraging its proprietary software, Atlas.

Drug discovery through simulation and modeling requires unprecedented computational capabilities beyond the petaflop, or more than one million billion operations per second. Qubit, a deeptech company, has worldwide access to existing and emerging supercomputers with one of the largest private GPU supercomputers for drug discovery in France. Using our in-house platform Atlas that integrates advanced simulation techniques that run on these supercomputers to accelerate calculations by a factor of 100 000, thus performing calculations in a few hours versus over a year's time. These simulations, along with optimized small molecule identification strategies and in-house experts in computational and medicinal chemistry, will allow several chemical series to be explored in parallel.

Qubit Pharmaceuticals is looking for a Research Scientist (M/F) as part of its development.

YOUR MISSION

As a Research Scientist at Qubit Pharmaceuticals, you will help to build the RNA platform, as part of the project: "Targeting RNA and RNA-protein interactions using small molecules".

The work will focus on RNA/protein structure and dynamics and RNA-binding protein interactions with small molecules in order to inhibit RNA binding. Polarizable molecular dynamics simulations will be used to understand the system and free energy simulations will be used to design the interactions with small molecules and propose more effective ligands. This will be done using the massively parallel software Tinker-HP and the multipolar polarizable force field AMOEBA. Advanced molecular dynamics simulation methods will also be developed and applied, to ensure adequate sampling of conformations and converged free energies.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING?

• System preparation

• Molecular dynamics simulations

• Structural dynamics analysis

• Free energy simulations

• Small molecules preparation

• Bibliographic work

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCES WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are looking for talented individuals with a passion for the latest quantum technologies that can bring new ideas to problem solving and desire to apply them to design better drugs, faster.

Qualification:

• PhD in physical chemistry, theoretical chemistry, biophysics, or a related field.

Experience:

• From 5 to 7 years of experience

Skills:

• Molecular dynamics simulation essential
• Free energy simulations essential
• Statistical mechanics
• Advanced sampling techniques
• Knowledge of RNA structural dynamics / RBP and RNA mechanism and interactions
• Very good knowledge of written and spoken English

Contract proposal

• Duration: Full time – Permanent
• Starting date: from January 2nd, 2024
• Salary according to profile
• Health insurance and provident fund 100% covered
• Lunch vouchers worth €9 covered at 50%.
• Location: Paris 14th
• Possibility of working from home 2 days per week, depending on tasks

Keywords:

Physical chemistry; theoretical chemistry; biophysics; Molecular dynamics simulation; statistical mechanics ; RNA; RNA-binding proteins; small molecules.