Hundreds of thousands of donors donate blood at Sanquin: the Dutch national blood bank and a highly regarded institute for knowledge and innovation in the field of blood. Besides providing the national bloodsupply we also perform high quality research on all facets of blood, blood donations and transfusions. The research programme of Sanquin is centered around four medical priorities, including anemia, bleeding and hemostasis, immunity & inflammation, immunotherapy. Within Sanquin Research nearly 230 investigators and technicians are involved in fundamental, translational, clinical and applied research.

Our high level of research requires that we adopt and develop the latest in research technology in NGS, proteomics, imaging and flow cytometry. This generates large amounts of new raw scientific data each and every day that require processing and analysis using advanced bioinformatics.

The position
We are looking for a postdoctoral candidate with bioinformatics experience to develop a state-of-the-art transcriptomic pipeline to identify contaminating pyrogens in medical products. The Monocyte Activation Test (MAT) allows manufacturers of injectable drugs, including plasma-derived products, and implantable medical devices to test their products for the presence of both endotoxin and non-endotoxin pyrogens without requiring the use of animal models for testing. MAT services (diagnostics) provides MAT services to pharma to verify that drug products contain pyrogens below set limits. This to assure that the product is safe for the use in patients. At the moment, when products are tested positive for pyrogens, we are not able to identify which pyrogen is contaminating the product. In this project we aim to set up a method by which the contamination (pyrogen) in the product can be identified using a state-of-the-art transcriptome profiling approach. Unique transcriptomic signatures of a library of pyrogens will be obtained to identify unknown contaminants by applying machine learning approaches in a to be developed bioinformatics pipeline.

Research group
The project will be executed in the Department of Immunopathology. The department comprises 40-45 people (postdocs, PhD-students, undergraduate students and technicians) that all work on related research topics. The project will be supervised by Dr. Anja ten Brinke, who has expertise in cellular immunology and Dr. John van Dam, who is heading Sanquin`s bioformatics facility. This project will be performed in close collaboration with the division Diagnostics, which offer MAT services testing.