The Royal Society has awarded prestigious medals to Sir Greg Winter, Professor Sir Mike Stratton and Professor Sam Behjati for his or her pioneering work, writes editor Paul Brackley.
Sir Greg, an emeritus scientist on the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, has been awarded the Royal Society’s most prestigious award, the Copley Medal, for pioneering protein engineering, notably antibody engineering for the worthwhile manufacturing of therapeutic antibodies.
Awarded yearly for sustained, glorious achievements in science, The Copley Medal is considered the world’s oldest scientific prize, first awarded in 1731 and predating the first Nobel Prize by 170 years. Sir Greg, who was grasp of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2012 to 2019, has a Nobel Prize too.
He said: “I am very grateful to the Royal Society for this honour. It provides a great opportunity to thank my mentors, colleagues, post-docs and students for their myriad contributions in making therapeutic antibodies a scientific possibility, and the institutions, companies, clinicians, patients and investors that allowed our work to be applied. In particular I have to thank the Laboratory of Molecular Biology for sustaining the crucible in which scientific dreams can be made a reality.”
Sir Greg’s evaluation has focused on genetic and protein engineering.
He obtained inside the Nineteen Eighties within the idea all antibodies have the similar elementary building, with solely a small change making them explicit for one aim.
He constructed upon César Milstein and Georges Köhler’s monoclonal antibody technique, which was a means of isolating and producing many copies of the similar explicit individual antibody from the large repertoire that the immune system makes.
Sir Greg pioneered strategies to make antibodies a lot much less susceptible to impress an immune response in victims, making them larger suited to human medical use.
Today, therapeutic antibodies are used to cope with every kind of non-infectious diseases along with most cancers, rheumatoid arthritis and numerous sclerosis.
He confirmed strategies to ‘humanise’ mouse monoclonal antibodies using recombinant DNA know-how, then demonstrated strategies to create completely human antibodies from libraries of human antibody genes.
It was this that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. Crucially this method allowed the know-how of human antibodies to human self-antigens, which is required for the remedy of non-infectious diseases.
Sir Greg established the spin-out agency Cambridge Antibody Technology to translate the evaluation and it made the antibody Humira (adalimumab), which was marketed by Abbvie and proved invaluable inside the remedy of rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s sickness. The world’s top-selling pharmaceutical drug for numerous years, with revenues peaking at higher than $20bn per 12 months, it now holds the lifetime product sales report of higher than $200bn.
Cambridge Antibody Technology floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1997, sooner than it was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2006.
Sir Greg prepare two completely different spin-outs based mostly totally on his work on the LMB – Domantis, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2007, and Granta Park-based Bicycle Therapeutics, which was listed on NASDAQ in 2019 and the place he stays a non-executive director.
Having joined the LMB as a PhD scholar, Sir Greg spent almost all his evaluation career there and on the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (CPE). He was knighted for suppliers to molecular biology in 2004.
Meanwhile Prof Sir Mike Stratton obtained the Royal Medal (Biological) for his foundational work in most cancers genomics, along with the invention of cancer-causing genes and the identification of mutational signatures which have revolutionised understanding of most cancers.
A senior group chief and former director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, he’s moreover Mutographs crew lead at Cancer Grand Challenges.
Sir Mike established the Cancer Genome Project in 2000, using the newly-sequenced human genome as a template on which to systematically sequence most cancers genomes.
The work led to the invention of mutated most cancers genes, resembling BRAF, which provided the premise for novel centered most cancers therapies. It moreover led to the invention of mutational signatures from the environmental exposures and endogenous mutational processes that set off most cancers inside the first place.
Sir Mike’s work moreover led to the invention of the breast most cancers susceptibility gene BRCA2 and the sequencing of the first full most cancers genome.
He said he was “extremely honoured and humbled” and added: “The information of the award instantly introduced into my head the meeting of faces and voices of colleagues I’ve had in over 40 years in scientific analysis; PhD college students, postdoctoral fellows, workers scientists, staff members in or out of the laboratory supporting the entire enterprise, senior colleagues with whom large concepts have been shared, chewed over and acted on, and people who have suggested, mentored and supported me.
“I am deeply grateful for the multitude of conversations we have had together, the furrowed brows at difficult junctures, the sparkling eyes at moments of epiphany, and the profound, generally unspoken, collective commitment to the extraordinary work of the human imagination that is the pursuit of knowledge about the natural world and its capability to bring benefits and hope to people with cancer.”
Prof Sam Behjati has been awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture for discoveries on the developmental origins of childhood cancers.
A Wellcome senior evaluation fellow on the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and scientific professor of paediatric oncology on the University of Cambridge, he’s moreover a practising advisor at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
Prof Behjati’s research combines single-cell transcriptomics and most cancers genomics, serving to to unravel the id and origin of most cancers cells, notably childhood cancer, with the aim of enhancing diagnostics and coverings.
In his scientific evaluation operate, he ensures every baby with a steady tumour in his space receives whole-genome sequencing, enabling additional actual diagnoses and centered therapies.
He said he was “humbled and grateful” and added: “I am very fortunate to have been supervised by two masters of the trade, Mike Stratton and Peter Campbell. I would not be where I am today without their teaching and support. I now have a team of inventive, driven and kind people from different corners of the world, all united by a love of collaborative discovery science. It is a delight to see our group’s basic research into childhood cancer genetics recognised as worthy of this honour.”
The three are amongst 25 medal and award winners recognised this 12 months by the Royal Society, the UK’s nationwide academy of sciences.
Sir Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said: “The scope of scientific knowledge and experience in this year’s line-up is amazing. These outstanding researchers, individuals and teams have contributed to our collective scientific endeavour and helped further our understanding of the world around us. I am proud to celebrate outstanding science and offer my congratulations to all the 2024 recipients of the Royal Society’s medals and awards.”
