CAMBRIDGE, England & BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bicycle Therapeutics, a biotechnology company pioneering a new class of therapeutics based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bicycle®) product platform, today announced that its founder and Board member, Sir Gregory Winter, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in developing phage display for the directed evolution of antibodies and peptides to produce new medicines. He shares the Nobel Prize with Frances Arnold and George Smith.
“We are extremely proud that Greg’s pioneering work in phage display of peptides and antibodies has been recognized by the Nobel Committee,” said Kevin Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Bicycle Therapeutics. “His inventions have underpinned the development of the majority of marketed antibody products, which have transformed the way many cancers and other diseases are treated. We are delighted to be working with Greg to apply the Bicycle technology he invented with Christian Heinis, and develop the next generation of first-in-class, highly targeted new medicines for oncology and other diseases of high unmet need.”
Sir Gregory is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is a fellow of the Royal Society, and was knighted in 2004 for services to science. 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. Sir Gregory 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. His 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. 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®.
About Bicycle Therapeutics
Bicycle Therapeutics is developing a unique class of chemically synthesized medicines based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bicycle®) product platform to address therapeutic needs unreachable with existing treatment modalities. Bicycle’s internal focus is in oncology, where the company is developing targeted cytotoxics (Bicycle Toxin Conjugates), targeted innate immune activators and T-cell modulators for cancers of high unmet medical need. Bicycles’ small size and exquisite targeting delivers rapid tumor penetration and retention while clearance rates and routes can be tuned to minimize exposure of healthy tissue and bystander toxicities. The company’s lead program, BT1718, is rapidly advancing towards the clinic in collaboration with Cancer Research, UK. The company’s unique intellectual property is based on the work initiated at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., by the scientific founders of the company, Sir Gregory Winter and Professor Christian Heinis. Bicycle has its headquarters in Cambridge, U.K., with many key functions and members of its leadership team located in the biotech hub of Boston, Mass. For more information, visit www.bicycletherapeutics.com or follow us on Twitter at @Bicycle_tx.
