Zürich-Schlieren, Switzerland, September 20, 2011 -- Covagen announced today that Sir Gregory Winter is joining its Scientific Advisory Board.
Sir Gregory Winter is a member of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge (UK). He has served LMB as a Head of Division, Deputy Director and Acting Director. His scientific career has almost entirely been based in Cambridge where his work included protein sequencing, nucleic acid sequencing and protein engineering. He is mainly known for pioneering the development of technologies to make humanized antibodies (by grafting hypervariable regions from rodent antibodies to human antibodies) and human antibodies from large antibody repertories. Most of the therapeutic antibodies on the market, including Avastin, Herceptin and Humira, were developed using these technologies. He was a Founder and Director of Cambridge Antibody Technology (acquired by Astra Zeneca), a Founder and Director of Domantis (acquired by GSK) and more recently a Founder and Director of Bicycle Therapeutics. Sir Gregory Winter has received numerous international prizes and awards, and in 2004 was knighted for his services to Molecular Biology.
Sir Gregory Winter stated: “The versatility of the Fynomer technology platform looks highly suitable for the development of novel protein therapeutics, and I am looking forward to working with Covagen.”
Julian Bertschinger, Covagen’s CEO added, “We are very pleased to have gained Sir Gregory Winter as member of our Scientific Advisory Board. His tremendous knowledge in the field of protein engineering is very valuable for Covagen.”
For further details, please contact:
Covagen AG
Dr. Julian Bertschinger, CEO
Tel: +41 (0) 44 732 46 60
julian.bertschinger@covagen.com
About Covagen: Covagen is a privately held company pioneering the commercialization of Fynomers as next generation protein drugs to address unmet medical needs in inflammatory diseases and cancer. Fynomers represent a novel class of protein therapeutics. Due to their favorable biophysical properties, Fynomers with different binding specificities can be combined in a single molecule, thus creating drugs with new mechanisms of action. Fynomers are ideally suited to enhance the potency and functionality of antibodies without compromising the antibodies’ beneficial drug-like properties, and therefore, follow-on products based on clinically validated antibodies can be created rapidly.
