John McCafferty is a British scientist, one of the founders of

Cambridge Antibody Technology Cambridge Antibody Technology (officially Cambridge Antibody Technology Group Plc, informally CAT) was a biotechnology company headquartered in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. Its core focus was on antibody therapeutics, primarily using pha ...

alongside Sir Gregory Winter and David Chiswell. He is well known as one of the inventors of scFv antibody fragment phage display, a technology that revolutionised the

monoclonal antibody A monoclonal antibody (mAb, more rarely called moAb) is an antibody produced from a cell Lineage made by cloning a unique white blood cell. All subsequent antibodies derived this way trace back to a unique parent cell. Monoclonal antibodies ...

drug discovery. McCafferty and his team developed this process following failures previously generating antibodies by immunizing mice. Later improvements of antibody phage display technology enables the display of millions of different antibody fragments on the surface of filamentous phage (better known as antibody phage library) and subsequent selection of highly specific

recombinant antibodies Recombinant antibodies are antibody fragments produced by using recombinant antibody coding genes. They mostly consist of a heavy and light chain of the variable region of immunoglobulin. Recombinant antibodies have many advantages in both medic ...

to any given target. This technology is widely exploited in pharmaceutical industry for the discovery and development of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies to treat mainly cancer, inflammatory and infectious diseases. One of the most successful was HUMIRA (

adalimumab Adalimumab, sold under the brand name Humira, among others, is a monoclonal antibody used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, plaque psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurati ...

), discovered by

as D2E7 and developed and marketed by Abbott Laboratories. HUMIRA, an antibody to

TNF alpha Tumor necrosis factor (TNF, cachexin, or cachectin; formerly known as tumor necrosis factor alpha or TNF-α) is an adipokine and a cytokine. TNF is a member of the TNF superfamily, which consists of various transmembrane proteins with a homolog ...

, was the world's first phage display derived fully human antibody, which achieved annual sales exceeding $1bn therefore achieving blockbuster status. Humira went on to dominate the best-selling drugs lists - in 2016: The best selling drugs list researched by Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, published in March 2017, details that Humira occupied the number 1 position for 2015 ($14.012 billion) and 2016 ($16.078 billion). Whilst for 2017, Abbvie reports that Humira achieved $18.427billion of sales in 2017 In 2002, after 12 years in Cambridge Antibody Technology (now

MedImmune MedImmune, LLC was a wholly owned subsidiary of AstraZeneca before February 14, 2019, when it was announced that the MedImmune name and branding would be discontinued in favor of AstraZeneca. MedImmune was founded in 1988 as Molecular Vaccines, ...

, a fully owned subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca), McCafferty set up a group at the Sanger Institute developing and utilising methods for protein generation and recombinant antibody isolation in high throughput for proteomic applications. McCafferty has been involved in developing large human antibody repertoires both at CAT and at the Sanger Institute from which antibodies of high affinity and specificity to any antigen can be derived. He ran a laboratory at the Biochemistry Dept at University of Cambridge capitalising on the above technologies with a focus on the study of protein:protein interactions driving direct cell:cell communication and has recently founded a new therapeutic antibody discovery biotechnology company
IONTAS Ltd
In 2018, McCafferty's 1990 phage research paper was cited by the Nobel committee when awarding the chemistry prize to Sir Gregory Winter and George Smith.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McCafferty, John Living people British biologists Academics of the University of Cambridge Year of birth missing (living people)