John McCafferty

John McCafferty is a British scientist, one of the founders of Cambridge Antibody Technology 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 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 and subsequent selection of highly specific recombinant antibodies 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), discovered by Cambridge Antibody Technology as D2E7 and developed and marketed by Abbott Laboratories. HUMIRA, an antibody to TNF alpha, 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 and 2016. Whilst for 2017, Abbvie reports that Humira achieved $18.427billion of sales in 2017