Terence Rabbitts

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.[2]

Terry Rabbitts obtained a BSc at the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia where he studied molecular genetics, obtaining a First Class Honours. He obtained a PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill (NIMR) supervised by Thomas Work and by Ken Murray in Edinburgh on mitochondrial nucleic acid homogeneity. At NIMR, he became interested in molecular immunology from Peter Medawar’s work on immune tolerance. 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 became a group leader at LMB in 1978 and succeeded Fred Sanger as joint Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry at LMB in 1998, together with César Milstein and later with Sir Greg Winter. He was Director of the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine in 2007-2012 and moved to the University of Oxford to become Professor of Molecular Immunology at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. He has been Professor of Molecular Immunology in the Division of Cancer Therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London since 2020.

His experience in biotechnology includes chairing the Scientific Advisory Board of Cambridge Antibody Technology from its launch until its IPO, of Quadrant Healthcare until its acquisition by Elan, and he was an SAB member of Domantis until acquisition by GSK, and a Board member of Aptuscan until its acquisition by Avacta, though he remains on the Scientific Advisory Board of Avacta. He is a co-founder of two start-up companies, Orbit Discovery and of Quadrucept Bio.

His research has focussed on antibody and T cell receptor gene diversity, gene rearrangement and aberrant rearrangement of chromosomes (chromosomal translocations) in cancer. He pioneered the method of cDNA cloning, an approach universally used in bioscience and biotechnology, and elucidated the organization, diversity and rearrangement of human antibody genes, which defined the building blocks for construction of therapeutic antibody repertoires. He also pioneered chimaeric antibodies (with the late Michael Neuberger). He discovered the LMO and HOX11 chromosomal translocation families in T cell leukaemia and the first fusion gene in a solid tumour. He developed the first knock-in gene, now a widely employed approach in gene targeting and gene editing. He also pioneered the design of intracellular antibody single domain fragments (iDAbs) and established approaches to develop these macromolecules with warheads to induce cellular phenotypes (that he dubbed macrodrugs) methods to select chemical surrogates of single domain fragments as drug leads.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an EMBO Member. He has been awarded the Colworth Medal, the CIBA prize and the Clotten Foundation Prize in recognition for his work on the diversity and rearrangement of human antibody genes, and on chromosomal translocation genes in cancer aetiology