European award for UK immunologist

An academic who developed a treatment for autoimmune disease that has helped millions of patients around the world has received a prestigious lifetime achievement award at this year’s European Inventor of the Year awards.

Professor Marc Feldmann

Professor Marc Feldmann, from Imperial College London, received the honour for his work identifying why autoimmune diseases such as arthritis cause the immune system to fight itself. Together with Imperial colleague Professor Sir Ravinder Maini, he discovered that the key lay in molecules responsible for cell communication, known as cytokines.

“It is a wonderful feeling to have one’s lifetime work and original inventions acknowledged in such a major way, only the second time this award has been given.” Said Professor Feldmann, now based at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at Imperial.

“The work on which this award was based was generously funded over a very long term by the Arthritis Research Campaign. Many people have also made major contributions to these inventions, especially Sir Ravinder Maini,” he added.

The awards - set up by the EU Commission and European Patent Office -   recognise innovators and innovations that have made a significant and lasting contribution to technical development in Europe and beyond.

In 1991, Professor Feldmann and his colleagues found that all the different cytokines could be stopped by blocking one kind, Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF)a. In 1992, the first series of successful trials were run with rheumatoid arthritis patients at the Kennedy Institute. The improvements in patients’ health were so dramatic that nurses working could identify by mere sight which patients had been given a placebo and which had received TNFa blockers.

Since the method was patented in 1995, TNFa inhibitors have become the therapy of choice for stopping the inflammatory and tissue-destructive pathways of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.