Nobel Prizewinner Sir Greg Winter is guest speaker at Business Weekly Awards presentation banquet

Nobel Prizewinner and Cambridge life science innovator Sir Greg Winter will be guest speaker at the Business Weekly Awards presentation dinner at Homerton College on September 14.

Sir Greg, who is also co-founder and a director of reigning Business of the Year Bicycle Therapeutics, will address Cambridge’s science & technology achievements and potential. Sir Greg won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in phage display of peptides and antibodies; he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2012-2019. 

For much of his scientific career, he was a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, 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 humanise 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 humanised 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.

He 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), specialising in chemistry and biochemistry; for his Ph.D. (1976) and postdoctoral work (1977-1981), he specialised 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.

Companies can enter the Business Weekly awards by filling in the online form or by emailing chair of judges, Tony Quested. Early entries include Advanced Infrastructure, Astex Pharmaceuticals, BIOS Health, Decorte Future Industries, Macomics, NRG Therapeutics, VividQ and Zetta Genomics.

This year’s sponsors in alphabetical order are: Arm, AstraZeneca, Barclays, Bruntwood SciTech, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge Network, Cambridge Science Park, Marshall of Cambridge, Mills & Reeve, PwC, TTP plc and Unity Campus.

Lead forensic sponsor Mills & Reeve, a UK leading law firm, will set up an interview with entrants’ chosen spokesperson to prepare a confidential report for the judges. 

The award categories are:

• Young Company of the Year
• Cambridge Judge Graduate Business of the Year
• The Sir Michael Marshall Engineering Excellence Award
• Disruptive Technology
• The Pathfinder Award
• Technology Scale-up
• Life Science Scale-up
• Life Science Innovation
• International Trade Champion
• Quoted Company of the Year.
• Cambridge Judge Business School Woman Entrepreneur of the Year
• Sustainability Champion
• DeepTech Innovation
• Investment of the Year 

From all of the entrants a Business of the Year will be selected to join a Hall of Fame that includes Abcam, Acambis, Arm, Autonomy, AVEVA, Bicycle Therapeutics, British Sugar, Cambridge Antibody Technology, Cambridge Quantum, CSR, Darktrace, Domino, Frontier Developments, Horizon Discovery, Ieso Digital Health, Perkins Engines, Pi Group, Ryanair, Sepura, TTP, Treatt plc, Virata and Xaar plc.