Photo credit: — File:Gregory Winter, 2016 (cropped).jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Gregory P. Winter
born 1951 · United Kingdom · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2018
British molecular biologist who harnessed phage display to evolve antibodies in vitro, leading to blockbuster human antibody drugs.
Nobel Prize work
Winter applied phage display to antibodies: he showed that antibody fragments could be presented on the surface of bacteriophages while their genes stayed inside, so that binders for a chosen target could be fished out from huge libraries and iteratively improved. This directed evolution produced the first fully human therapeutic antibody, adalimumab (Humira).
Fields
Related topics
Protein structure and function
A protein is a sequence that folds into a shape; its surface and flexibility help determine what it can bind or catalyse.
Directed evolution of enzymes, synthetic biology
Directed evolution improves a biomolecule through iterative variation and selection, using laboratory cycles that emulate natural selection.