Andrew Cope graduated in Medicine from the University of London with First Class Honours.

After training in general internal medicine at Northwick Park Hospital, The National Hospital for Nervous Diseases and the Royal Brompton Hospital, he trained in rheumatology with Professor Sir Ravinder Maini and Dr Barbara Ansell CBE.

In 1990, he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Training Fellowship, studying for a PhD in Cytokine Biology with Professor Marc Feldmann at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology. Following a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof Hugh McDevitt at Stanford University, California, studying transgenic models of autoimmunity, he returned to the Kennedy Institute to set up his own laboratory.