February 21, 2025 | This episode marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most influential papers in biomedical science—the 1975 Milstein and Köhler paper on hybridoma technology, which paved the way for monoclonal antibodies. Ralph Minter, Biotech CSO/CTO, discusses this important milestone with a true pioneer in the field, Sir Greg Winter, Nobel Laureate and one of the key figures in the development of therapeutic antibodies.

GUEST BIO

Sir Gregory Winter FRS, Emeritus Scientist, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology
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.

MODERATOR BIO

Ralph Minter, PhD, Biotech CSO/CTO
Ralph is an expert in antibody discovery with over 20 years’ experience in the area, and with expertise across multiple disease areas. He was previously Senior Director at AstraZeneca and prior to that was part of Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), which later became MedImmune. In addition to antibody discovery, Ralph is known for developing new technology platforms within the biologics field. An example of this is phenotypic, or target-agnostic, antibody screening which Ralph helped initiate at MedImmune and which has yielded novel therapeutic antibody candidates currently in the clinic. At Alchemab, he is applying this experience to develop a new target-agnostic screening platform based on the analysis of resilient individuals to identify both drug leads and novel targets in the areas of Neurodegeneration and Oncology.