Cambridge scientists have won three major awards from the Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of sciences.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute has toasted its associations with two prominent winners – Professors Sir Mike Stratton and Sam Behjati. Sir Greg Winter, who first put the gears on Bicycle Therapeutics was awarded this year’s Copley Medal.

The Copley Medal 2024 was awarded to Nobel Laureate Sir Greg Winter for pioneering protein engineering – especially antibody engineering for the successful production of therapeutic antibodies.

The Copley Medal is thought to be the world’s oldest scientific prize and it was awarded 170 years before the first Nobel Prize. First awarded in 1731 following donations from Godfrey Copley, it was initially bestowed for the most important scientific discovery or for the greatest contribution made by experiment. Notable winners include Benjamin Franklin, Dorothy Hodgkin, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.

Sir Greg is credited with having invented techniques to both humanise (1986) and, later, to fully humanise using phage display, antibodies for therapeutic uses. He was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with George Smith and Frances Arnold.

He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and was then appointed Master of Trinity. Sir Greg is a co-founder and board member of Nasdaq-quoted Bicycle Therapeutics which is growing fast on both sides of the Atlantic.

Professors Stratton and Behjati were recognised for their outstanding contributions to cancer research. Sir Mike received the Royal Medal (Biological) for his foundational work in cancer genomics while Professor Behjati won the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture for his discoveries on the developmental origins of childhood cancers.

Sir Mike Stratton is currently a senior group leader and formerly Director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He is also Mutographs team lead at Cancer Grand Challenges. He has been awarded the Royal Medal for his transformative work in cancer genomics, including the discovery of cancer-causing genes and the identification of mutational signatures that have revolutionised understanding of cancer.

Mike established the Cancer Genome Project in 2000 to use the newly sequenced human genome as a template on which to systematically sequence cancer genomes.