Bioengineering Scientist

Alkion BioInnovations, an Imperial College’s spinoff, is a young biotech company located in Versailles, France. Alkion has developed an innovative patented production method of complex active ingredients in plants. Our mission is to offer a sustainable, standardised and quality production of high-value ingredients to pharmaceutical, agri-food and cosmetics industries. Alkion has received many French and EU awards and grants for its pioneering works on vaccine adjuvants, cannabinoids and recombinant proteins.

We are currently looking for a Genetic Bioengineering Scientist, specialist in CRISPR, to join our R&D team on exciting and challenging pharmaceutical and agrifood projects from development to industrialisation, directly reporting to our CSO.

• Your role:
• Define and supervise scientific and technological projects to produce metabolites and recombinant proteins in plants
• Work collaboratively with other team members
• Participate in the laboratory’s global organisation
• Report to CSO
• Participate on R&D tasks (non exhaustive):
• Design, build and engineer a variety of plasmid constructs including binary vectors
• Transient transformation into various plants via agroinfection to test the designs and catalytic activity of the CRISPR/Cas machinery
• Generate stable edited lines with CRISPR/Cas9 machinery in crops
• Analyze edited events via different molecular tools and sequencing
• In vitro plant propagation methods, callus transformation and regeneration methods
• Recombinant expression, purification and characterization of proteins
• Attend conferences and make scientific presentations

* Your profile:

• Ph.D. or Ms/Engineer degree in plant biology or plant biotechnology with preferably a strong emphasis on molecular biology and protein biochemistry
• Background to include a minimum of 2 years in a public or private organisation with a strong experience with CRISPR tools (mandatory)
• Experience in managing projects, including project planning and reporting
• Positive experience of management of interns or technicians
• Usage on a daily basis of molecular biology methods (PCR, qPCR, sequencing, gene editing technology…) and protein biochemistry (extraction, isolation and detection)
• Experience on chloroplast transformation is a plus
• Industrial experience is a plus
• Knowledge of patent application is a plus
• Ability to work in English – International experience

* Your personality:

• Demonstrated scientific creativity, initiative, independent thought and problem-solving capability
• Good communication, organization, teamwork skills
• Entrepreneurial mind, positive and open-minded

We are committed to gender equality, diversity and inclusion.

The company’s working languages are French and English. We have an international background and welcome international high potential candidates.