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TIG/TAC News Page

17th November 2015

From scientist to patient and back again – the ultimate in clinical translation? Steve’s research career has been in transplantation and he was part of the team that developed CAMPATH, the first humanised therapeutic antibody. He recently received a live, paired donation kidney transplant together with CAMPATH treatment to reduce the chances of rejection. Read Full Story.

1st June 2014

Lemtrada (originally known as CAMPATH or Alemtuzumab) is recommended by NICE for treatment of relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) under the NHS in England.

1st January 2014

We have now started work on the new Senior Investigator Grant "PARIS" (Physician Aided Reconstitution of the Immune System)awarded to Herman Waldmann by the European Research Council.

1st January 2013

Herman Waldmann has now retired from being the Head of Department (which has now passed to Matthew Freeman), but he is continuing to run the Therapeutic Immunology Group within the Dunn School.

3rd December 2012

Christian Peter successfully defended his D.Phil thesis - congratulations.

October 2012

Kath Nolan has now moved to Manchester to take up a Lectureship in Immunology - congratulations.

22nd July 2011

Steve Cobbold has been awarded the title of Professor of Cellular Immunology in recognition of academic distinction by the University of Oxford.

28th July 2010

The MRC Program Grant "Therapeutic Immunoregulation" (principle investigators Herman Waldmann and Steve Cobbold) has been succesfully renewed until 2013.

13th July 2010

After a group visit to Genzyme UK in Cambridge we are now actively proceeding with a collaborative agreement to work on the role of TGFbeta in mechanisms of immune tolerance.

6th June 2009

This whole Web Site was given an overhaul - in particular, a number of older images and links seemed to no longer work in current versions of Internet Explorer. These have now hopefully all been fixed. The defunct local search engine has now also been replaced with a Google powered, site specific, search function.

3rd May 2007

News from the MS Society that trials of CAMPATH (alemtuzumab) treatment for relapsing/remitting multiple sclerosis are looking very promising

1st November 2005

The operations of the Therapeutic Antibody Centre in regard to production of TIG antibodies will stop. A large part of the Centre's activities will now be devoted to GMP manufacture of DNA vaccines and Gene Therapeutics under the management of the Department of Medicine.

26th May 2004

We have been successful in acheiving renewal of our MRC Program grant on "Therapeutic Immunoregulation" for a further five years from Jan 2005.

24th May 2004

Duncan Howie joins the lab to bring in some expertise on signalling

26th February 2004

Genzyme is to aquire Ilex Oncology, including all their activities with CAMPATH antibodies. More details here.

31st January 2004

Peppy Rebello has now left the TAC to work in BioAnaLab Ltd, the spinout company from the TAC that provides an imminological and pharmokinetic testing servive to the pharmaceuticals industry.

17th December 2003

Masahide and Yuki Tone have now moved to Philadelphia to continue their careers. We plan to continue to collaborate with them. This means that, for now, we no longer have a Cytokine Lab within TIG.

17th December 2003

The rat anti-murine GITR and GITRLigand monoclonal antibodies are now available (please see the antibody request page).

15th December 2003

Luis and Martha are pleased at the arrival of a new daughter - Leanor.

27th August 2003

You can now download data from 29 murine SAGE libraries derived from a range of effector and regulatory T cells, and antigen presenting cells, together with software for the analysis and presentation of SAGE data from here.

26th August 2003

Congratualtions to Mark and Alison who now have a baby boy: Angus Frewin-McFarlane.

30th April 2003

The Therapeutic Antibody Centre was recently visited by the Medicines Control Agency inspectors who found it to be in compliance with the new EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines.

4th April 2003

We have renamed the "Antibody Engineering Lab" as the "Molecular Engineering Lab" to reflect the wider range of technologies we now apply to immunotherapeutic strategies.

14th March 2003

The BioAnaLab Ltd. web site goes live. BioAnaLab is a spinout company from the Therapeutic Antibody Centre.

8th March 2002

There is now an Acorn emulator available from Virtual Acorn that means you can run all my RISC-OS software under Windows on a PC.

4th March 2002

The TIG AutoMACS has now moved to Room 50 (214.20.06), and the FACSort has moved to the Central Flow Cytometry Facility.

15th February 2002

Chun today is celebrating what appears to have been a successful defence of his thesis - congratulations!

13th August 2001

MabCamPath(R) is launched in the UK by Schering Health Care for treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) who have failed alkylating agents and fludarabine therapy. It was mentioned on national TV and radio news .

12th July 2001

CAMPATH-1H (alemtuzumab or MabCamPath(R)) has been approved for marketing by Schering for Millenium and Ilex Partners in Europe by the European Commisssion for use under exceptional circumstances of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) who have failed alkylating agents and fludarabine therapy. Millenium Press release.

22nd June 2001

Alasdair Coles and Sara Thompson are leaving us at the end of this month but will continue to collaborate with us on developing Th1, Th2 and Treg markers for application in human diseases, especially in Multiple Sclerosis patients during treatment with CAMPATH-1H or other experimental therapies, in the Dept. of Neurology, Cambridge.

9th May 2001

CAMPATH-1H (alemtuzumab or CamPath(R)) has been approved by the FDA for marketing in the USA by Millenium and Ilex Partners for treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) who have failed alkylating agents and fludarabine therapy.

3rd April 2001

Benson is top of his class (that's Mark's dog!)

2nd April 2001

Chun and his family now have a new baby boy (Albert) - congratulations!

30th March 2001

CAMPATH-1H (MabCamPath) has been recommended for marketing approval in Europe by the European Medicines Evaluation Agency's (EMEA) Committee on Proprietary Medicinal Products (CPMP) under exceptional circumstances of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) who have failed alkylating agents and fludarabine therapy. CAMPATH-1H (alemtuzumab) is still under review by the FDA for marketing in the USA.

14th August 2000

The University of Oxford has conferred on Geoffrey Hale the title of Professor of Therapeutic Immunology effective from the 1st October 2000: congratulations to Geoff!

13/27th June 2000

We now also have within TIG an "AutoMACS" machine that performs rapid, repeatable positive or negative selection, with the possiblility of "multiparameter" sorting using detachable paramagnetic beads. For more details ask Luis Graca in Room 41 or download the instructions for use (PDF file).

1st June 2000

Diana has now left us to take up a job back in Paris, and we have been joined by Raquel Castejon who will be taking over Diana's project.

24th February 2000

The older FACSCan has been moved to the TAC and replaced by a shiny new 4 colour FACSCaliber with FACSLoader automatic tube loader - more details to follow on the FACS pages.

18th December 1999

Luis and Marta are getting married in Portugal today - congratulations!

13th October 1999

Bug fixed in Web Site Search Engine (no searches were finding matches).

1st October 1999

There have been a few changes in personnel as the new academic year starts. In particular, Patrick Harrison has left the TAC for pastures new in the "real" biotechnology industry, Gina Pollard is moving to the Dunn School Accounts Dept., and Karen Honey has moved to Seattle and handed over the baton of suppression to Luis Graca. We wish them all well in their new jobs. We are also happy to welcome Clare Drew who will working for her D. Phil with Paul, and Ruth Croxton, an FHS Physiology student who is doing her project with Kath. We are also pleased that we will be funded for another five years from the 1st January 2000 by the MRC Programme Grant "Therapeutic Immunoregulation".

23rd August 1999

Lisa Gilliland gave birth to a new daughter - Charlotte Heather Claire - congratulations!

3rd August 1999

The University of Oxford has conferred on Steve Cobbold the title of Reader in Cellular Immunology from the 1st October 1999.

2nd August 1999

Lin Bateson has joined the TAC team as the new production assistant.

5th July 1999

Karen Honey's viva seemed to go well - congratulations!

18th June 1999

Congratulations to Jen who has just had her D.Phil viva and came out with a smile on her face and not many corrections to do!

18th June 1999

The two PCs in rooms 47/48 have now been loaded with WinMDI that is a FreeWare (so you can run it at Home too!) alternative to CellQuest for analysing your FACS data.

1st June 1999

Tony Gallagher has joined the TAC team to work with Patrick as the Quality Assurance Assistant.

18th May 1999

The FACSort has been fixed and should be working OK - you may need to change your compensation settings slightly, especially for 4 colour.

13th May 1999

The FACSort seems to have blown the main laser - we are waiting for the engineer to fix it.

12th May 1999

The Cell Bank database has now been upgraded to run from Access 97, making it Y2K compliant. The old PC we logged onto the Cell Bank with has been decomissioned, and you should now use the new Dell machine. A minor change to the setup means that you will need to log on to Dunn1 first (if you do not have a user name and password you can get one from John Marriott).

7th May 1999

Complete redesign of the TIG and TAC Web Site completed.

This news page added.

If you have any TIG or TAC news that you would like me to put on this page please send me an E-mail (Steve Cobbold) or just tell me!

"Developing short-term treatments for long-term outcomes"