Rate My Professor Mark Howarth

Professor Mark Howarth holds the Sheild Chair of Pharmacology in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, a position he assumed in 2022. Prior to this, he served as Professor of Protein Nanotechnology in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. His academic journey includes graduate studies in molecular immunology at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, and the Cancer Sciences Division at the University of Southampton. He furthered his training with postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), collaborating with Alice Ting and Moungi Bawendi—recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—where he pioneered tools in chemical biology, advanced microscopy, and nanotechnology for studying receptor trafficking.

His research focuses on innovating protein technologies for therapeutic and vaccine design, spanning protein engineering, synthetic biology, vaccines, cancer signalling, antibodies, computational protein design, immunology, cell therapy, chemical biology, bioconjugation, and directed evolution. Howarth's group engineers and evolves proteins and cellular systems, bridging fundamental analyses of protein interactions to clinical applications. In recognition of his contributions to chemical biology, he received the Royal Society of Chemistry Norman Heatley Prize in 2017. He co-founded SpyBiotech in 2017, which has advanced his protein superglue technology into clinical vaccine trials against SARS-CoV-2 and cytomegalovirus. He also co-founded Gastrobody Therapeutics. As Translational Champion for the Department, he supports enterprise activities. His resources have been distributed to over a thousand academic groups and licensed to companies; several lab alumni have founded start-ups. Notable publications include "Click Biology highlights the opportunities from reliable biological reactions" (Nature Chemical Biology, 2025), "Proactive vaccination using multiviral Quartet Nanocages..." (Nature Nanotechnology, 2024), and "Mosaic nanoparticles elicit cross-reactive immune responses..." (Science, 2021).