lectures

Sir Ernst Chain Lecture 2025: A tale of two antibodies

Imperial College

July 2

Lecture theatre 200, City and Guilds Building

Event linkcalender

The Department of Life Sciences is delighted to welcome you to the Sir Ernst Chain Lecture 2025, delivered by Sir Gregory Winter.

Please register to attend in person in advance of the event via the link on the left hand side.

Please note that there is no live stream provision for this lecture.

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen a revolution in the development of monoclonal antibodies as game-changing pharmaceutical drugs. As one of its ringleaders, Sir Gregory Winter will take us on a journey through the development of two antibodies, alemtuzumab and adalimumab, telling us the story of the interplay of technology, intellectual property, business and politics that shaped this amazing breakthrough.

Biography

Sir Gregory Winter CBE FRS FMedSci is a Nobel Prize-winning English molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.

He is credited with having invented techniques to both humanize and, later, to fully humanize using phage display, antibodies for therapeutic uses. Previously, antibodies had been derived from mice, which made them difficult to use in human therapeutics because the human immune system had anti-mouse reactions to them. For these developments, Winter, along with George Smith and Frances Arnold, were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

About the Sir Ernst Chain Lecture

The Sir Ernst Chain Lecture is an annual event held by Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences, commemorating the achievements of Sir Ernst Chain for humankind. In 1945 Ernst Chain, Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery and isolation of penicillin. Fleming made the original famous observation of the production of an “anti-bacterial agent” at St Mary’s, however, it was Ernst Chain who developed the process to isolate penicillin.