Sir Greg Winter, FRS
Co-founder and Director

Sir Greg Winter, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in phage display of peptides and antibodies, is co-founder of Bicycle Therapeutics and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a crown appointment. For much of his scientific career, he was a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, U.K., serving as both Deputy and Acting Director, is a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted in 2004 for services to science.

Sir Greg invented techniques to humanize rodent antibodies for use as therapeutics and co-developed alemtuzumab/Campath-1H. Later, he developed methods to make fully human antibodies against human self-antigens using antibody libraries. Sir Greg’s inventions are used in most of the antibody products on the market, including the humanized antibodies alemtuzumab/Campath-1H, trastuzumab/Herceptin, bevacizumab/Avastin, palivizumab/Synagis and the first human antibody (adalimumab/Humira) to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Sir Greg has acted as an entrepreneur to translate his scientific inventions to medicines. He was a founder of Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT,1989) and Domantis (2000); these companies pioneered the use of antibody libraries to make fully human antibody therapeutics including adalimumab/Humira and belimumab/Benlysta.

Sir Greg has won several international scientific prizes, including the Prix Louis Jeantet de Medecine (Switzerland) in 1989; the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (Molecular Immunology, Saudi Arabia) in 1995; the Biochemical Analysis Prize of the German Society for Clinical Chemistry in 1995; the Cancer Research Institute William B. Coley Award (U.S.) in 1999; the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 2011 and the Gairdner Prize in 2013. For his work with industry, he received the National Biotechnology Ventures Award (U.S.) in 2004 and the BioIndustry Association Award (U.K.) in 2008.

Sir Greg is a graduate of University of Cambridge (1973), specializing in chemistry and biochemistry; for his Ph.D. (1976) and postdoctoral work (1977-1981), he specialized in protein and nucleic acid sequencing, respectively, and with colleagues determined the genome sequence of influenza virus. From 1982, Sir Greg pioneered the science of protein engineering, focusing first on enzymes (with A. Fersht) and then antibodies.