Tim Elliott

I left the University of Oxford (Balliol) with a first in Biochemistry in 1983 and completed my PhD in cancer immunotherapy at the University of Southampton in 1986 where I investigated the relationship between binding modes and efficacy for some of the first experimental immunotherapeutic antibodies to be made. 

My postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Herman Eisen at the Center for Cancer Research focused on the biochemistry of MHC class I; then in 1990 I returned to the University of Oxford to join the Institute for Molecular Medicine as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, to join a key group of immunologists studying antigen presentation at the molecular level. We discovered that short antigenic peptides stabilised MHC class I molecules and were essential for MHC I expression at the cell surface.

As a Wellcome Trust Fellow, I set up my own research group at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Oxford to investigate how MHC I molecules select their cargo for presentation to CD8+ T cells - a subject that has occupied me to this day! 

In 2000, I moved to the University of Southampton as Professor of Experimental Oncology and five years later became Associate Dean for the Faculty of Medicine, stepping down briefly to take up interim Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) for the University of Southampton. These jobs allowed me to help build a better research environment for interdisciplinary research - culminating in the opening of the  interdisciplinary Southampton Institute for Life Sciences in 2013.  Not surprisingly during this time my research took an exciting new turn as I began to collaborate with mathematicians and engineers to develop mechanistic models that could simulate the antigen presentation pathway. I also helped raise money for the Southampton Centre for Cancer Immunology, of which I became the Founding Director in 2018 and which helped to give my research a more translational focus - developing new ways of predicting tumour immunogenicity.

in 2020 I was enticed back to Oxford to take up the Kidani Chair of Immuno-Oncology, establish the Centre for Immuno-Oncology and to help develop Oxford Cancer - a city-wide community of researchers, health professionals and patients focused on generating and applying new knowledge to improve human health and wellbeing.  The same year I became founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Immunotherapy Advances published by the British Society for Immunology. My research continues to focus on antigen processing and presentation throughout the cancer trajectory from normal to non-lethal to invasive disease, and to investigate the impact this has on generating and maintaining T cell immunity to tumours.