Technical Research Assistant

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The Brigham and Women's Hospital, Inc.

Mass General Brigham relies on a wide range of professionals, including doctors, nurses, business people, tech experts, researchers, and systems analysts to advance our mission. As a not-for-profit, we support patient care, research, teaching, and community service, striving to provide exceptional care. We believe that high-performing teams drive groundbreaking medical discoveries.

Join the Santagata Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) as a Technical Research Assistant I working on a multidisciplinary program to develop new targeted therapies for rare pediatric and adult brain tumors.

We are seeking a talented and highly motivated individual to help identify and validate therapeutically actionable cell-surface proteins in rare brain cancers, with particular emphasis on targets for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and other emerging targeted therapies.

The position is supported by a Department of Defense research program focused on overcoming the major challenges posed by rare brain tumors: limited tissue availability, biological heterogeneity, and the lack of effective targeted treatments.

The successful candidate will work with advanced tissue-imaging and spatial molecular technologies to quantitatively characterize therapeutic targets in patient tumor specimens and patient-derived models. Major approaches include cyclic immunofluorescence (CyCIF), ORION whole-slide multiplexed imaging, conventional immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence, and integration with spatial transcriptomic data.

The research program spans rare pediatric and adult brain tumors, including ependymoma, craniopharyngioma, atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor, pediatric high-grade glioma, rare meningiomas, embryonal tumors, and other molecularly defined tumors. A major goal is to determine whether drugs developed for more common cancers can be repurposed for rare brain tumors based on quantitative measurement of therapeutic target expression.

You will be based in Dr. Sandro Santagata's laboratory at BWH and work closely with investigators at Harvard Medical School's Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, Dana‑Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children's Hospital, and collaborating laboratories. The project brings together neuropathologists, cancer biologists, chemists, imaging scientists, computational biologists, and neuro‑oncologists.

This is an excellent opportunity for an early-career scientist interested in translational cancer research, molecular imaging, biological chemistry, quantitative pathology, and therapeutic development. The position provides extensive hands‑on experience with high‑dimensional tissue imaging, antibody qualification, assay development, image analysis, and integration of molecular and morphologic data from human tumors.

• Develop a spatial molecular atlas of therapeutic targets in rare pediatric and adult brain tumors by generating, organizing, and quantitatively analyzing multiplexed tissue‑imaging data across tumor types, cases, and histologic regions.
• Perform multiplexed tissue‑imaging experiments using CyCIF, ORION, immunofluorescence, and related methods to quantitatively characterize cell‑surface therapeutic targets in rare pediatric and adult brain tumors.
• Develop and qualify antibodies against therapeutic targets, including established and emerging ADC targets. Compare antibody clones and optimize staining conditions with attention to specificity, cellular localization, signal‑to‑background ratio, dynamic range, and reproducibility.
• Design and optimize multiplex antibody panels incorporating therapeutic targets together with tumor‑lineage, proliferation, immune, vascular, and cell‑state…