Modern pharmaceuticals and biotechnology

When Greg Winter was a young scientist carrying out laboratory work in the 1970s, he saw the potential of using antibodies to tackle infection but had no idea of the extent to which his research would eventually be commercialised.

His efforts to “humanise” monoclonal antibodies (MABs) derived from mice, to tackle disease without excessive side-effects, paved the way for a modern category of medicines that has helped build the modern biotechnology industry and resuscitate large pharmaceutical companies.

Initially, much of the focus was on applications in cancer, and drugs such as Avastin for breast and colon cancer are among the results.

MABs exist in multiple sclerosis, asthma and beyond, while the most important impact has been in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, leading to blockbusters such as Humira, the first fully human MAB, which is now the world’s second-best-selling medicine, generating more than $9bn in revenues last year. The success highlights how complex, global and uncertain the process of biotech drug development is, relying on academic and government-funded research, and the vagaries of commercial support for development.

The UK Medical Research Council funded the original work in the 1970s of César Milstein and Georges Köhler to isolate MABs, for which they won the Nobel prize. Winter humanised them, and his colleague Michael Neuberger developed a new technique to help. To date, the MRC has received some £600m in royalties as a result.

Winter says that traditional big pharma companies were initially sceptical, and it was smaller US biotech companies – notably Genentech and Centocor (now known as Janssen Biotech) – that worked to develop these pioneering biological treatments.

One of Winter’s own companies, Cambridge Antibody Technologies, which developed Humira, was acquired in 2006 by AstraZeneca, which in turn licensed the drug to Abbott Laboratories. Its success was so great that investors’ concerns that it would destabilise the rest of the business helped trigger the spin-off last year of Abbott’s pharmaceutical arm into AbbVie.

Today, large pharmaceutical companies are keener than ever to buy biotech companies or license their most promising products. MABs and other biological drugs have provided an important shot in the arm for the survival of an industry dominated by chemicals until just a few years ago.

Andrew Jack