Sir Greg Winter, Sir Mike Stratton and Prof Sam Behjati honoured by Royal Society

The Royal Society has awarded prestigious medals to Sir Greg Winter, Professor Sir Mike Stratton and Professor Sam Behjati for their pioneering work, writes editor Paul Brackley.

Sir Greg, an emeritus scientist at 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, especially antibody engineering for the successful production of therapeutic antibodies.

Awarded annually for sustained, outstanding achievements in science, The Copley Medal is thought to be the world’s oldest scientific prize, first awarded in 1731 and predating the first Nobel Prize by 170 years. Sir Greg, who was master 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 research has focused on genetic and protein engineering.

He became interested in the 1980s in the idea that all antibodies have the same basic structure, with only a small change making them specific for one target.

He built upon César Milstein and Georges Köhler’s monoclonal antibody technique, which was a method of isolating and producing many copies of the same individual antibody from the vast repertoire that the immune system makes.

Sir Greg pioneered techniques to make antibodies less likely to provoke an immune response in patients, making them better suited to human medical use.

Today, therapeutic antibodies are used to treat a wide variety of non-infectious diseases including cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

He showed how to ‘humanise’ mouse monoclonal antibodies using recombinant DNA technology, then demonstrated how to create fully 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 generation of human antibodies to human self-antigens, which is required for the treatment of non-infectious diseases.

Sir Greg established the spin-out company Cambridge Antibody Technology to translate the research and it made the antibody Humira (adalimumab), which was marketed by Abbvie and proved invaluable in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. The world’s top-selling pharmaceutical drug for several years, with revenues peaking at more than $20bn per year, it now holds the lifetime sales record of more than $200bn.

Cambridge Antibody Technology floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1997, before it was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2006.

Sir Greg set up two other spin-outs based on his work at the LMB – Domantis, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2007, and Granta Park-based Bicycle Therapeutics, which was listed on NASDAQ in 2019 and where he remains a non-executive director.

Having joined the LMB as a PhD student, Sir Greg spent almost all his research career there and at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (CPE). He was knighted for services to molecular biology in 2004.

Meanwhile Prof Sir Mike Stratton received the Royal Medal (Biological) for his foundational work in cancer genomics, including the discovery of cancer-causing genes and the identification of mutational signatures that have revolutionised understanding of cancer.

A senior group leader and former director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, he is also Mutographs team 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 cancer genomes.

The work led to the discovery of mutated cancer genes, such as BRAF, which provided the basis for novel targeted cancer therapies. It also led to the discovery of mutational signatures from the environmental exposures and endogenous mutational processes that cause cancer in the first place.

Sir Mike’s work also led to the discovery of the breast cancer susceptibility gene BRCA2 and the sequencing of the first complete cancer genome.

He said he was “extremely honoured and humbled” and added: “The news of the award immediately brought into my head the assembly of faces and voices of colleagues I’ve had in over 40 years in scientific research; PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, staff scientists, team members in or out of the laboratory supporting the whole enterprise, senior colleagues with whom big ideas have been shared, chewed over and acted on, and those who have advised, 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 research fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and clinical professor of paediatric oncology at the University of Cambridge, he is also a practising consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Prof Behjati’s research combines single-cell transcriptomics and cancer genomics, helping to unravel the identity and origin of cancer cells, specifically childhood cancer, with the aim of improving diagnostics and treatments.

In his clinical research role, he ensures every child with a solid tumour in his region receives whole-genome sequencing, enabling more precise diagnoses and targeted 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 among 25 medal and award winners recognised this year by the Royal Society, the UK’s national 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.”