Cambridge, UK and Boston, MA (October 3, 2018) — 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 recognised 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 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. His 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. 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 synthesised 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 deliver rapid tumour penetration and retention while clearance rates and routes of elimination can be tuned to minimise exposure of healthy tissue and bystander toxicities. The company’s lead program, BT1718, is being evaluated in a Phase I/IIa trial 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.
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