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Sir Marc Feldmann (born 2 December 1944) is an Australian-educated British Immunology. He is a professor at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.
He moved to London in the 1970s, working first with Avrion Mitchison at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's Tumour Immunology Unit; in 1985 he moved to the Charing Cross Sunley Research Centre and the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (which joined with the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College in 2000; in August 2011 the Institute transferred to the University of Oxford.
Feldmann's group demonstrated that diseased joints have far more pro-inflammatory cytokines than normal, and postdoctoral researcher Fionula Brennan identified one of these, tumour necrosis factor alpha, (abbreviated TNFα) as the key.Feldmann, M., Brennan, F.M. and Maini, R.N. (1996) Role of cytokines in rheumatoid arthritis. Annu Rev. Immunol. 14: 397-440.
Blocking TNFα reduced levels of the other pro-inflammatory cytokines in test-tube models of arthritis,Brennan, F.M., Chantry, D., Jackson, A., Maini, R.N. and Feldmann, M. (1989) Inhibitory effect of TNF-alpha antibodies on synovial cell interleukin-1 production in rheumatoid arthritis. Lancet ii: 244-247. and this provided the rationale for testing TNF blockade in rheumatoid arthritis patients which had failed all existing treatment.
The first of a series of successful clinical trials was performed in 1992 at Charing Cross Hospital, using the antibody infliximab from Centocor, a biotech now part of Johnson and Johnson.
The success led to other companies joining the race to market. By 1998,Elliott, M.J., Maini, R.N., Feldmann, M., Long-Fox, A., Charles, P., Katsikis, P., Brennan, F.M., Walker, J., Bijl, H., Ghrayeb, J. and Woody, J. (1993) Treatment of rheumatoid arthritis with chimeric monoclonal antibodies to TNF-alpha. Arth. Rheum 36: 1681-90. etanercept (Enbrel)Elliott, M.J., Maini, R.N., Feldmann, M., Kalden, J.R., Antoni, C., Smolen, J.S., Leeb, B., Breedveld, F.C., Macfarlane, J.D., Bijl, H. and Woody, J.N. (1994) Randomised double-blind comparison of a chimeric monoclonal antibody to tumour necrosis factor-alpha (cA2) versus placebo in rheumatoid arthritis. Lancet 344: 1105-1110. was approved for treatment in the US, and by 1999, infliximab (Remicade) was also approved; there have been multiple additional approved TNF inhibitor, and they have become standard therapy for stopping the inflammatory and tissue-destructive pathways of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases including Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.Feldmann, M. and Maini, R.N. (2001) Anti-TNF-alpha therapy of rheumatoid arthritis: What have we learned? Annual Review Immunology 19: 163-196.
Feldmann is Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Pathologists. He was elected a Fellow of several national Academies, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society of London and is a Corresponding Member of Australian Academy of Science, and a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences, US. He was knight bachelor in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours.
In 2012 he delivered the Croonian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on anti-cytokine therapy.
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