PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotech building first-in-class and best-in-class vaccines and cancer immunotherapies using machine learning-driven design and relentless empiricism. We design, develop, and manufacture our own RNA medicines end-to-end because we believe great pharmaceutical science can only flourish in tight feedback loops that iterate rapidly. PopVax’s experimental work and clinical dose production is based at the RNA Foundry, our integrated R&D and GMP-capable clinical dose production facility in Hyderabad.

PopVax's north star is our goal of developing novel vaccines and therapeutics over the next decade with the cumulative ability to save 1 million lives each year – the Million Lives Mission. To that end, we are developing first-in-class vaccines against Hepatitis C Virus, Strep A, and adult pulmonary TB, broadly-protective best-in-class vaccines against COVID-19, influenza, and HPV, and precision immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours such as liver cancer and pancreatic cancer.

Our work is funded by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi Fund, the Gates Foundation, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and Renaissance Philanthropy. Our first vaccine program will begin a Phase I clinical trial in the US in mid-2026 conducted & sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We intend to put 6 novel vaccines and immunotherapies into Phase I clinical trials over the next 3 years.

No matter the job title, each person’s role at PopVax is ultimately focused on helping take safe & effective new medicines that represent a step-change improvement on the current standard-of-care to the people who need them as fast as possible. If you want to work where the ambition is high, the learning curve is steep, and the work matters to billions, you’ll feel at home here.

If you’re excited by the idea of advancing scientific, clinical, and regulatory frontiers of vaccines and immunotherapies, spending each day developing medicines with the potential to save millions of lives, and building a generational global pharmaceutical company in India along the way – join us!

We are looking for an exceptional molecular and cell biologist to work on our wet lab team across a number of projects, from mRNA IVT to stable cell line generation and maintenance to mAb production.

QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD in molecular or cell biology or similar, or a masters degree in a relevant field with 3+ years of additional experience

• Experience with DNA and RNA extraction

• Experience with plasmid extraction at various scales

• Experience with vector transformation in DH5-Alpha or similar bacterial strains

• Extensive experience with PCR techniques — inverse, touch down/up, gradient, long amplicons, difficult targets, Taq man, real-time PCR

• Extensive experience with cloning methods — cut and paste, Gibson assembly, Gateway, In-Fusion

• Extensive experience handling, maintaining, and stocking various cell lines, in particular HEK 293T, HeLa, and MCF-7, as well as suspension cell lines such as the Expi and FreeStyle series

• Experience performing transfection, both chemical and electroporation, at various scales

• Experience with achieving protein expression in bacteria, yeast, insect, and mammalian cells, and (optionally) protein separation and purification

• Experience performing protein estimation assays such as Bradford, BCA, or ELISA

• Experience estimating relative protein expression via Western blot

• Experience with FPLC systems such as Cytiva’s Akta series or Bio-Rad’s NGC line is a plus

We offer very competitive compensation, comprehensive health insurance covering immediate family (including pre-existing conditions), and, most importantly, a collaborative work environment focused on solving the cutting-edge multidisciplinary challenges of our novel mRNA platform.