Dr Simon E. Hufton

Dr Simon E. Hufton is a Biochemist by training and has over 20 years’ experience in the field of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.

In 1995 he moved to the University Hospital Maastricht, Netherlands to join the group of Prof.  Hennie Hoogenboom, one of the pioneers in phage display technology and antibody engineering, where he received his training.  Simon’s early work used phage display to isolate novel cancer antigens using the anti-tumor immune response and contributed to the founding of a startup company, Target Quest B.V. As head of technology development at Target Quest his group also worked on engineering of human single domain antibodies against B7.1 and CTLA-4 for applications in immunomodulation.  He also made key contributions to the development of yeast display technology and invented novel approaches to engineer multi-chain eukaryotic proteins.

In 2000 he was appointed Director of Research at Dyax Corp, Liege, Belgium and lead several therapeutic antibody projects, the most notable of which was the discovery of a novel anti-tumor angiogenesis antibody, DX-2240, which was subsequently licensed to Sanofi-Aventis. In 2005 he joined Wyeth in Dublin, Ireland to set up an antibody optimization group. At Wyeth he established ribosome display and applied this technology to the structure-function dissection of both conventional monoclonal antibodies and to novel single domain antibody fragments isolated from sharks. His interest in single domain antibodies continued at Wyeth where he was co-project lead for a new anti TNFα specific nanobody up to IND filing. 

In 2009 he returned to the UK and joined NIBSC as a principal scientist and monoclonal antibody specialist. He has established a research group working on structure-function of monoclonal antibodies and antibody fragments such as nanobodies, with a particular interest in their safety, efficacy and delivery. He has also established antibody engineering capabilities at NIBSC for applications in antibody discovery and epitope mapping. He was appointed to the position of Section Head Molecular Immunology in 2017, which now also includes the additional functional areas of immuno-heamatology, autoimmunity, therapeutic immunoglobulins and albumin.