John Isaacs is Professor of Clinical Rheumatology at Newcastle University, UK.

Over the past 25 years, his work has focused on the potential of novel immunotherapies to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ranging from target identification to early- and late-stage clinical trials. He has performed several pioneering experimental medicine studies in patients with inflammatory disease, challenging existing dogma and informing the design of subsequent generations of therapeutic agents. In 1992 he was the first to demonstrate immunogenicity of a humanised therapeutic antibody, CAMPATH-1H (Lancet). Professor Isaacs’s research group is focussed on therapeutic tolerance induction. Recently his team have developed, and completed a phase 1 study of, tolerogenic dendritic cell therapy in inflammatory arthritis patients.