Andrew Bradbury was trained in medicine at the universities of Oxford and London, and subsequently practiced medicine for five years (one full time, and four part time) in the UK.
He received his Ph.D. (Cambridge University) in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under the guidance of Nobel Laureate, Dr. Cesar Milstein. After his Ph.D. he spent ten years in Italy: three as a post doc in the CNR Institute of neurobiology, Rome, Italy, where he was involved with cloning antibody genes for use in intra- and inter-cellular immunisation; and seven in Trieste, where he was first visiting professor, and subsequently tenured as assistant professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste, Italy). He moved to Los Alamos National Lab in July 1999, as a research scientist, and became a group leader in 2010. He left LANL in June 2017 to become chief scientific officer of Specifica (www.specifica.bio), a start-up founded in 2016 to sell unique client specific phage antibody libraries.
He has worked in the field of phage display and antibody engineering for almost thirty years, and has helped organize over fifty international congresses and practical courses in this field, both in Europe and the US. He was a founder member and the first president (2007-2010) of The Antibody Society, a professional society for all aspects of antibodies. He has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles, including a number of reviews and perspectives on phage display and antibody engineering. He recently published a commentary in Nature calling for changes in the way research antibodies are supplied, arguing that they should be sequenced and expressed recombinantly in order to improve reproducibility. His present research interests lie in improving in vitro display technologies in order to make in vitro antibody selection the preferred method to generate highly specific, high affinity antibodies. Within this context he has developed an antibody selection pipeline that combines phage and yeast display in methods that exploit the advantages of each. He maintains an active interest in technology development as it relates to display methods and antibody engineering, and also has a long-standing interest in the role auto-antibodies play in the etiology of Celiac disease.
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