[1] He was educated at John Ruskin Grammar School, the University of East Anglia where he graduated with a BSc with first class honours in Biological Sciences, and subsequently completed his PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London.

He worked as a post-doctoral fellow in Cesar Milstein's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge from 1973.

He also pioneered the design of intracellular antibody single domain fragments (iDAbs) and established approaches to develop these macromolecules (these he called macrodrugs) with warheads to induce cellular phenotypes).

Since 2020, his laboratory work has been focussed on developing methods to deliver intracellular antibody fragments into cells as drugs per se and targeting fusion proteins made from chromosomal translocations.

He was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2024 for applying molecular biology to human disease and the development of new therapeutics.