Ravinder Maini, board member, Domantis, Cambridge, UK

For Ravinder Maini, a mentor set him on the path that would eventually lead to the research that won him and a colleague a Lasker award last year (see CV). The molecular-biology revolution helped him complete it.

John Butterfield at Guy's Hospital in London first taught Maini not to accept any assumptions about disease. He remembers Butterfield saying sardonically that insulin therapy “had put back research on diabetes” because it treated the symptoms — and thus had stifled research into the underlying mechanisms. That kind of critical thinking steered Maini towards research, rather than clinical practice. “I was inquisitive about biological mechanisms of disease,” he says.

In 1968 he started work under Dudley Dumonde, one of the first in the United Kingdom to do cytokine research. His group eventually landed a grant to study cytokine expression in rheumatoid arthritis. “That's really where the course of my career changed dramatically,” Maini says. But to develop his ideas he had to wait for technology to catch up.

It did when Greg Winter, co-founder of Domantis, humanized monoclonal antibodies and started using them to treat disease. And once the cytokine genes that interested Maini were cloned in the 1980s, he and his collaborator Marc Feldmann realized that they could perhaps use monoclonal antibodies to treat rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases. These developments “opened the door”, says Maini.

Now that the drugs he helped to develop have proved successful, Maini wants to make them more widely available. The cost of manufacturing therapeutic proteins means that a year's treatment can cost about $15,000. So when Winter approached Maini to become involved with Domantis, he was eager, as the company's technology promises a cheaper and more specific way to make the proteins for treating the same autoimmune diseases.

Maini has never regretted pursuing clinical research — despite the 30-year-slog from concept to market. “Positive feedback keeps you going personally,” Maini says — despite “considerable scepticism” at some points.