We were delighted to welcome Nobel Prize Winner, Sir Gregory Paul Winter FRS, to the Annual Krebs Lecture on Wednesday 26 February 2020.

The lecture was extremely popular, selling out within a couple of days.

Sir Gregory Winter is a molecular biologist best known for his work on protein engineering and developing technologies to make therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs).

Sir Gregory’s talk was entitled, ‘Harnessing evolution to create new medicines’.

In recent years, the application of genetic engineering technologies and/or laboratory-based evolution have led to the development of antibodies as a new class of pharmaceutical drugs. Many of the best-selling drugs are now antibodies, particularly for treatment of auto-immune inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.

Continuing technology development is opening up new prospects for antibody therapeutics, and for other peptide- and protein-based drugs created in like manner. In particular the display of repertoires of proteins and peptides on the surface of filamentous bacteriophage has the potential to create small antibody mimics combining advantages of antibodies and small molecule drugs.

As well as describing the development of the field of antibody therapeutics, Sir Gregory talked about progress with a platform for making peptide therapeutics in which small peptides are chemically constrained and developed as targeted cytotoxic agents.