John McCafferty is a British scientist, one of the founders of Cambridge Antibody Technology alongside Sir Gregory Winter and David Chiswell.
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.
[5] Whilst for 2017, Abbvie reports that Humira achieved $18.427billion of sales in 2017[6] In 2002, after 12 years in Cambridge Antibody Technology (now MedImmune, 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.
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.