Senior or Principal Scientist: Cancer Biology & Immunology

Pay: $100,000 – $170,000 per year
Location: Rockville, MD (on-site)

About Us:

Founded in 2017 by scientists from Harvard Medical School and UCSF, Autonomous Therapeutics is developing first-in-class nucleic acid medicines across infectious disease and oncology indications.

Our platform fuses synthetic biology, synthetic chemistry, and therapeutic engineering to achieve a simple goal: target-activated (precision) medicines that are programmed to only activate in diseased cells. Imagine a chemotherapy that avoids your healthy cells.

You would join a team of 25 PhD scientists and engineers across synthetic biology, chemistry, immunology, cell biology, in vivo biology, and AI in our 20,000 sq ft facility outside Washington, D.C.

The Role:

We are looking for an exceptional cancer biologist, immunologist, virologist, or cell biologist to help develop first-in-class therapeutic candidates from discovery through IND.

This is a high-impact position for an outstanding experimental biologist with expertise in both in vitro and in vivo biology. The ideal candidate has strong scientific passion and curiosity, experimental rigor, and direct experience using in vitro and in vivo studies to evaluate biological hypotheses or therapeutic candidates.

You will work closely with our synthetic chemistry, immunology, and in vivo biology teams to evaluate whether novel therapeutic candidates are potent, selective, mechanistically compelling, and ready to advance into safety, efficacy, and pre-IND studies.

You will report directly to the Head of Preclinical Biology and the President of R&D.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, perform, and analyze both in vitro and in vivo studies to evaluate novel therapeutic candidates.

• Develop and optimize assays for potency, selectivity, mechanism of action, pharmacodynamic activity, and therapeutic response.

• Connect cell-based findings with animal-study design, including dose selection / timing, control selection, and biomarker selection.

• Help interpret in vivo results and design follow-up in vitro, ex vivo, or in vivo experiments to probe efficacy, toxicity, pharmacodynamic activity, or unexpected biological findings.

• Prioritize candidates for advancement into in vivo efficacy, biodistribution, pharmacology, and safety studies.

• Collaborate with synthetic biology, chemistry, immunology, and preclinical development teams.

• Present data clearly, pressure-test hypotheses, and help drive scientific decision-making across company programs.

• Mentor junior scientists and play a key role in helping build a rigorous translational biology function.

About You:

You have a PhD in Cancer Biology, Immunology, Virology, Cell Biology, Pharmacology, or a related field.

You also have 5+ years of demonstrated expertise in both in vitro and in vivo biology. Your specific area of biology expertise is less critical to us, but you should have expertise in ONE or more of the following:

Cancer Biology, Immunology, or Cell Biology

Experience studying tumor biology, metastasis, immune-cell biology, innate immunity, or mechanisms of therapeutic response and resistance.

Cell-Based Assays & Candidate Screening

Experience designing, optimizing, and interpreting cell-based assays to evaluate therapeutic candidates, including imaging, flow cytometry, qPCR, ELISA/MSD, high-throughput screening, or other quantitative biological readouts.

In Vivo Biology / Pharmacology

Experience designing, executing, analyzing, or interpreting in vivo studies to evaluate therapeutic candidates, including: tumor models, infectious disease models, inflammatory disease models, efficacy or pharmacodynamic readouts, tissue collection strategies, biodistribution, or PK/PD.

Therapeutic Development

Experience evaluating novel therapeutic modalities, including nucleic acid medicines, biologics, immunotherapies, cell therapies, antibodies, small molecules, or targeted cancer therapies.

Additional Expertise in One or More of the Following is Preferred:

Translational Assay Systems

Experience with primary immune cells, PBMCs, organoids, spheroids, co-culture systems, or other translational models.

Immunology & Quantitative Biology

Experience with flow cytometry, immune phenotyping, functional immune assays, imaging, or other quantitative approaches to biological mechanism and candidate evaluation.

Therapeutic Model Systems

Deep experience with oncology efficacy models, infectious disease efficacy models, PK/PD studies, biodistribution studies, or biomarker-driven in vivo pharmacology.

High-Throughput Biology

Experience with high-throughput screening, automation, assay miniaturization, image-based assays, or quantitative screening workflows.

Nucleic Acid Therapeutics

Familiarity with nucleic acid medicines (siRNA, ASO, aptamers or mRNA), synthetic biology, targeted delivery platforms, or other next-generation therapeutic modalities.

Why Join Us:

• Impact:
  Help develop first-in-class cancer and infectious disease medicines.

• Scientific Breadth:
  Work across synthetic biology, cancer biology, immunology, virology, chemistry, and in vivo pharmacology.

• Compensation:
  Highly competitive salary and equity (stock option) packages.

• Benefits:

  • Health, dental, and vision insurance

  • 401(k) with employer matching

  • Paid time off

• New Skills: 

  Have the opportunity to learn therapeutic development or robotics and AI: our engineering team can work with you to design custom high-throughput systems to accelerate your screens.

• Culture:

  Work alongside a highly collaborative team of scientists and engineers in a fast-moving biotech startup & help build the next generation of precision medicines.

Hiring Info:

• Work Authorization:

  Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.

• Merit-Based:

  Autonomous Therapeutics is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Hiring decisions are based on merit, qualifications, and business needs.