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Sheild Professor of Pharmacology, Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge
Mark Howarth moved to the University of Cambridge to take up the Sheild Chair in the Department of Pharmacology in 2022, where he leads the Howarth Group. Inspired by extraordinary molecular features from the natural world, his group develops new approaches for disease prevention and therapy. By engineering and evolving proteins and cellular systems, projects range from fundamental analysis of protein interactions through to clinical application.
He had previously been Professor of Protein Nanotechnology at Oxford University. He did graduate work in molecular immunology at Oxford University Institute of Molecular Medicine and Southampton University Cancer Sciences. In his postdoctoral work at MIT he developed tools in chemical biology, advanced microscopy and nanotechnology to understand receptor trafficking.
In 2017 Mark was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Norman Heatley Prize for chemical biology and helped to found SpyBiotech, taking the group’s vaccine approach into clinical trials. Several of the lab’s alumni have founded their own companies, with Mark acting as Translational Champion for the Department.
Mark gives lectures and workshops on Entrepreneurship to undergraduates and graduate groups. Resources from his group have been distributed to more than a thousand academic groups and licensed to a range of companies.
His work has been funded by ERC, BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust and through collaborations with multiple pharma and biotech companies.