The 2014 Antibody Special Issue is dedicated to our friend and colleague, Professor Jim Marks. With boundless energy, he continues to combine his interests as a brilliant MD and pioneering PhD scientist. In recognition of ongoing contributions to medical research, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (USA) in 2006. He continues to balance his dedication to anesthesiology and medicine with his passion for antibody engineering, immunotherapy and immunoimaging. He remains active as Professor of Anesthesiology and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the UCSF Medical School, and is the chief of staff at San Francisco General Hospital. Concurrently, he maintains a dynamic research group where he continues to make fundamental advances in antibody engineering, create important new immunotherapeutics and develop advanced immunoimaging agents. His doctoral work with Greg Winter at the MRC led to the first naive human scFv-antibody phage display library (Marks et al., 1991), while at Scripps the first disease-based human Fab antibody phage library was described in the same year (Burton et al, 1991). He has been generous with his time and has shared his antibodies and libraries around the world. I have known him personally as a close friend and collaborator since we were fellow group leaders, along with Lou Houston, Lou Weiner and Walter Stafford, in an NCI-funded National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group (1990-95). From the paradigm shifts of his early human scFv-phage display library work to his latest advances in immunoimaging and immunotherapeutics, Jim Marks has broadly stimulated antibody engineering to achieve a major impact on medicine, paving a path for others, as exemplified by the exciting investigations in this PEDS Antibody Special Issue.
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