Are you ready to play a crucial role in Gordian’s in vivo proof of concept experiments to identify the best therapeutic targets for development into new drugs?
We’ve shown that our platform predicts preclinical and clinical physiological responses from in vivo Mosaic screens. As an In Vivo Research Associate you’ll work alongside our in vivo team and Head of Cardiac Biology to test promising hits from our screens and execute assays and validation studies. Your results will tell us when we’ve found a promising therapeutic candidate for HFpEF, one of the incurable diseases we’re working on!
The Destination:
At Gordian Biotechnology, we are on a mission to cure age-related disease, allowing people to lead longer, healthier lives and wake up every morning more capable than the day before.
Age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment, and traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce compelling targets or effective treatments. To address this problem, Gordian’s platform enables in vivo Mosaic Screening to deliver and test hundreds of therapeutics simultaneously in individual animals. We select the most clinically relevant Patient Avatars whose age, physiology, and genomics most closely resembles human patients. Using these and other proprietary tools, we can scale in vivo efficacy testing to more targets than have ever been explored by biopharma, at the very beginning of the drug discovery process (more info on our website). This lets us develop and commercialize therapies with greater chance of impacting the world’s deadliest diseases, and eventually for the processes of aging itself.
The Journey:
Our mission is audacious, and the path will be full of both challenges and excitement. Two things characterize the Gordian experience: 1) We work as a team, with ownership in our own roles and trust in each other. 2) We strive for extraordinary outcomes, and in doing so grow our skills and capability.
Team – Relying on each other begins with transparency. We set clear goals, visibly connecting individuals and teams to our company objectives. This empowers each of us to make autonomous decisions about our work, knowing how they will affect the bigger picture. Our communication happens out in the open. We give and receive feedback from a perspective of helping each other grow, share mistakes, and ask for help.
Extraordinary – Every day, we ask ourselves “Could this process/outcome be even better?”. Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think helps us make the most progress, without asking for permission. We don’t shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, but find a way to excel. Our colleagues are amazing, both at what they do and as people. They inspire us to keep up, to not let them down, and be inspiring in return.
Like any cutting-edge research environment, Gordian doesn't believe in a standard 9 to 5 day. We set ambitious project goals and support each other to meet them, while maintaining the balance individuals need to thrive and achieve excellence. Our team is geared towards helping each other out, an orientation best exemplified through the support we provide for each others’ projects, both experimentally as well as through “pre-mortem” meetings to discuss possible failure modes and experimental design. We like getting things done and keep standing meetings to a minimum.
We like to have social as well as intellectual fun, including through weekly team lunches, monthly company happy hours, and regular social events hosted by Gordian for the broader community. We also encourage our colleagues to unwind; this year, in accordance with our unlimited vacation policy, each member took an average of 4.5 weeks of (offline) vacation, not including major holidays.
If this environment sounds appealing, come experience it with us. We are at the beginning of a long journey, and want both your ability and your personality along for the ride. Our culture is a source of great pride; it represents both who we are, and who we wish to be.
You can dive deeper here: https://www.gordian.bio/culture/
The Role:
Your primary mission as Research Associate in In Vivo Heart Failure will be to work at the forefront of our preclinical cardiac research efforts, focusing on executing high-impact experiments for the validation (proof of concept) and development (IND enablement) of heart failure studies. In this role, you will collaborate with the Head of Cardiac Biology and the In Vivo team to conduct and maintain rigorous in vivo assays for screening and validating heart failure models in rodents.
Your responsibilities will range from performing complex in vivo assays and image acquisition including echocardiography, exercise testing, tissue harvesting, and specialized heart failure assessments. You’ll be expected to master a variety of in vivo techniques and help to execute a range of validation and confirmation studies in cardiovascular biology.
Your focus at Gordian is for the validation or elimination of screen hits to happen as early as possible. Gordian is unique in that our in vivo discovery delivers results at a far greater scale than even the largest pharma company. This means that we aren’t dependent on the success of a single target, and we can survey the landscape of disease biology for the most promising target (or combination of targets) before leading their development towards clinical trials. You’ll work closely with our functional teams, and own the maintenance of in vivo systems to drive forward validation and development plans for our HFpEF program. You will be working on multiple projects at once, and seamless communication across departments is essential. You will need to pay attention to experimental descriptions and required outputs, and will be responsible for maintaining records and databases for samples produced in this role.
Within One Month, you’ll be proficient in handling mice and rats, with a foundational understanding of cardiac anatomy and the cardiac cycle. During this period, you will develop fundamental echo image analysis skills with high accuracy, and start training in echo image acquisition.
By the three-month mark, you will be proficient in echo image acquisition and advanced echo image analysis with high accuracy. You will have gained skills in tissue collection heart failure model development. You will start echo image acquisition work for screen studies.
At six months, you’ll achieve near-flawless echo image acquisition and analysis, complete the first rounds of confirmation and screen experiments, and be an established expert in advanced image acquisition and analysis methods including systolic function, diastolic function, and cardiac strain. You will begin training on other advanced methods for preclinical heart failure studies including invasive hemodynamics and produce the world’s first results from in vivo mosaic screening in a heart failure model.
And You:
You want a chance to do your best work, immerse yourself, and excel alongside people who will inspire you and whom you’ll be excited to spend your days with.
You want to play a key role in an early-stage startup: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness.
You are excited to use cutting-edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets and turn those into drugs.
A background doing either echocardiography or pressure volume loops on rodents is preferred, however if you haven't done these don’t worry we can teach you!
You have extensive experience handling rodents, performing injections (particularly retro-orbital and tail vein), and conducting blood collection. You are also highly skilled in executing routine rodent procedures, having performed tasks thousands of times with precision.
You have experience in heart failure or cardiac biology and have done tissue harvesting and sample preparation, especially in cardiovascular tissue.
You've done significant data analysis either in excel, graphpad prism, or google sheets.
You have a history of managing and collaborating on time-sensitive projects, and are comfortable working across multiple teams to execute experiments at a scale beyond any single person.
The Details:
Gordian aims to provide everything you need to thrive. Beyond our community and science, you’ll have enough equity to be a true stakeholder in the company, competitive salary, full health/dental/vision/life insurance, 401k with match, onsite lunch paid for 3 days a week, an onsite gym, whatever vacation you need to be at your peak, remote work flexibility, and access to world-class mentors and advisors to support your professional growth. Our building is in the heart of the biotech capital of South San Francisco.
