GLASGOW man John McCafferty has been elected a Fellow of both The Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, among the highest honours in the scientific world.
The prestigious accolades reflect his outstanding contributions as a world leader in biomedical and health research, work that has improved millions of lives.
As a Fellow of The Royal Society, John joins the ranks of scientific giants including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough.
“It’s not a bad thing for a wee boy from the Gorbals,” John told the Donegal News.
John grew up on Glasgow’s south side and is extremely proud of his roots and Irish heritage, having spent much of his childhood in his family’s native Donegal.
He recalled the “great excitement” he and his brothers felt ahead of summers spent with their granny in Doire na Mainséar in west Donegal.
Travelling on the Glasgow bus was a familiar journey for many members of the diaspora who flocked home to the hills each summer.
“It was always something we looked forward to.”
The McGinley bus left from the Donegal-dense Gorbals, where John and his family grew up.
John recalled the unmistakable waft of burning turf filling the air as their long journey neared its final destination.
“I always remember as you got to Letterkenny you started smelling turf fires. This was one of the things that would tell you you’ve finally arrived in Donegal.”
Some of his earliest and fondest memories are of arriving at the house after it had been closed all winter. He spoke about settling in for the long school holidays, airing clothes and getting the shopping in.
Much of the six-week stint was then spent running through fields and down by the river trying to catch salmon. As they grew older, the summers became about attending local dances and chatting up women.
He also recalled being perched under the stairs in Tessie’s in Meenaleck to phone home to Glasgow.
“You probably didn’t even need the telephone because you were shouting that loud,” he laughed.
John is the second eldest of five brothers. His older brother, Eamonn, was tragically murdered at the age of 19. There were only 14 months between the pair. This was a devastating time for their family.
Like many of his generation and background, John was the first in his family to go to university.
“For me it was a bit of a gradual thing, it wasn’t like I had some overarching ambition from a young age to pursue a life as a top scientist.”
He was always self-driven, but benefited from the enormous support of his parents, who valued education.
He recalled telling them he wanted to stay at school, complete his O-levels and Highers, and then go on to study at the University of Strathclyde.
“As I came to the end of my university degree, I said to my parents ‘I am going to do a PhD’ and they said ‘that’s great son, what’s a PhD?’”
His laboratory-based PhD eventually led him to a lifelong love of molecular biology and, ultimately, a move away from Glasgow to London in the mid-1980s.
“I had the idea and expectation I would find my way back, but I guess life takes on a different journey and each time there was a crossroads for me career-wise there was never really the same opportunity for me in Glasgow as there was down south so I ended up staying here.”
There he and his wife, Patricia Murphy from Kildare, raised their family and put down roots in Cambridge.
A subsequent job loss not long afterwards provided what he described as the “impetus” to form his first company in 1990.
“From the get go, I decided that was what I was going to do. Even though there were other people in the group thinking the same way, they had all applied for jobs and eventually the jobs came along and they had to make a choice.
“I deliberately didn’t apply for any jobs because I was determined that this was the path I was going to take.”
It marked the beginning of a clear and focused ambition to build companies around scientific innovation.
“My idea was that the worst thing that can happen is this doesn’t work out and in two years’ time I’m back in the job market.”
The gamble paid off.
As one of the two founding scientists at Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), John helped build one of the UK’s most successful biotechnology companies.
CAT’s technology led to the development of Humira, an anti-inflammatory medicine that became the world’s best-selling drug for many years. It achieved peak annual sales of $21.2 billion in 2022 and remains the highest-selling drug on a
cumulative basis, generating more than $230 billion in revenue by 2024.
John is widely recognised for his pioneering role in the invention, development and application of phage antibody technology.
The innovation underpins many of today’s antibody-based medicines and contributed to the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to co-inventor Sir Gregory Winter.
“Phage display is a technology that allows selection of human antibodies to any desired target that can then be used as medicines for cancer and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis,” John explained.
The technology John helped create has contributed to at least 15 approved antibody medicines worldwide and is used by many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca.
Throughout his decades long career, John has moved between industry and academia. He also founded two further biotechnology start-ups: IONTAS Ltd, named as a nod to his Gaeltacht roots, and Maxion Therapeutics Ltd, which is developing ion channel-blocking antibodies for a previously intractable class of drug targets.
Asked what advice he would offer young people, John said:
“If you can find something you love then everything else becomes so much easier, for me that’s the secret.
“At the end of the day, this is not a practice run, it’s your life and you might as well be doing something that you enjoy and if you’re doing that the rest of it all falls into place too.”