AbbVie Senior Scientist II at AbbVie leading recombinant peptide process development including expression, fermentation, and purification. Serves as technical lead across microbial-based peptide production.
Responsibilities
Lead recombinant peptide process-development activities, including expression strategy, host and clone screening, process optimization, and scale-up.
Design and evaluate expression constructs and microbial hosts, including Escherichia coli and yeast, for peptide production.
Develop and assess fusion-tag and carrier-protein strategies—including His-tag, GST, SUMO, and inclusion-body expression—to improve peptide stability, expression, host tolerance, and recovery.
Design and conduct clone-screening studies using microscale cultivation, parallel bioreactors, and other appropriate scale-down or high-throughput approaches.
Develop and optimize peptide recovery processes, including cell harvest and lysis, inclusion-body isolation and processing, and chemical or enzymatic cleavage of fusion partners.
Troubleshoot peptide-specific process challenges, such as aggregation, low solubility, degradation, incomplete cleavage, and co-eluting impurities; recommend and pursue appropriate solutions.
Interpret analytical results, including HPLC, UPLC, and LC-MS data, to assess peptide identity, mass accuracy, purity, and process-related impurities; partner with analytical teams to address characterization needs.
Evaluate emerging technologies and process approaches for recombinant peptide production, including genetic code expansion when relevant to program needs.
Apply AI/ML approaches, where appropriate, to analyze peptide sequence, structure, and experimental data in support of design, optimization, and candidate prioritization.
Communicate scientific plans, progress, challenges, conclusions, and recommendations clearly to project teams and other stakeholders.
Mentor junior scientists and provide technical direction in recombinant peptide bioprocessing.
Contribute to scientific publications and presentations at conferences, as appropriate.
Qualification
Preferred
Experience developing or manufacturing complex therapeutic peptides, particularly GLP-1 or related incretin peptides, in a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company or start-up environment.
Experience applying genetic code expansion to incorporate non-canonical amino acids at defined positions using engineered orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs and codon reassignment.
Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law:
The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future.
