The Humility of Humira’s Creator: a Conversation with Greg Winter
Written by Fernando Gomollón Bel
Humira is one of the all-time best-selling drugs. Its sales amassed $200 billion in two decades. For context, this is the time it took generic versions to legally even enter the market. Humira went from “the bench to a blockbuster”, as explained in a feature by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology when it hosted Greg Winter and his colleagues, including César Milstein, Georges Köhler and Michel Neuberger. Despite this immensely impressive success, Winter, a developer of the drug and 2018 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, remains a humble human. With his continually strong connection to the community in Cambridge, we were tremendously lucky to count on Winter’s wisdom during the latest King’s E-Lab Annual Nobel Prize Lecture.
Even if you’re regularly treated with Humira, which is used against diseases like Crohn’s, as well as for rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, leukaemia, and many more, it may still stand out as a slightly unusual word. For me, however, having grown up in a family of medical doctors, Humira, as the commercial brand for adalimumab, was everywhere. In fact, my dad has spent decades studying its success against the symptoms of Crohn’s disease. Throughout the years, adalimumab “transformed my patients’ lives for the better”, he told me in a message the day of the lecture.
Despite the success of Humira, Winter remains intimately connected with the community of entrepreneurs in Cambridge – it’s one simple way of his giving back to the birthplace of the best-selling drug. Winter explains that, although originally monoclonal antibodies weren’t designed with any practical applications in mind, “seeing them work in a real patient made [him] realise the importance of ‘technology transfer’”. This spirit, to translate technological innovations into the market, has stayed with him and, since Humira, Winter has been involved in the launch of many other start-ups, including Bicycle Therapeutics, valued at over $1 billion on the American stock market. In the conversation with Henrietta Mbeah-Bankas, Winter insisted on the importance of university spinouts for the nourishing of innovation and innovative spirit. “Academia is impervious to change”, he said, which contrasts with the environment in commercial companies, where innovations move much quicker because priorities pivot regularly and investors need to streamline decisions.
Winter worries about the direction technology transfer is taking in some universities and academic circles (and the impact that this could have on future innovation and innovators). Bureaucracy and excessive steps for decision-makers mean that it is now “incredibly difficult to create companies”, a situation that could eventually “kill the golden goose”. The overprotection of intellectual property plays an important role in this problem.
Personally, I think this was an interesting point of view – while public funding bodies and institutions keep pushing for patents and spin-off companies, maybe it’s time to take a step back and reassess the situation. What is actually the best way to promote commercialisation? Maybe it’s time to redesign the process, promoting cross-collaboration across universities, industry and investors to catalyse commercial applications instead of focusing on quick investments and fast-tracking patenting. Sometimes, the most successful discoveries just stay stagnant on a shelf, or become peer-reviewed published, but remain unnoticed.
This is because innovation isn’t always immediately recognised.
In this sense, activities such as the talks organised by the King’s E-Lab push the pollination of new ideas, through multidisciplinary debates and collaborative conversations. It’s the connections within the creative community in Cambridge that eventually make ideas like monoclonal antibodies really spark. Supporting entrepreneurship is more than supporting start-ups with seed funds and investments – it’s about nourishing this innovation.
Winter’s talk prompts two further considerations that should guide our approach as we look to rethink the entrepreneurship ecosystem in academia. He remarked how entrepreneurship is all about “learning on the job”, rather than relying on traditional training through formal classes. As a consequence, the system must count on, and bolster, structures that encourage collaboration across disciplines, fostering diversity and inclusivity as the basis for successful scientific discoveries and as foundation for supporting innovation. We learn as we do things with others, not just as we consume content through structured lessons.
Additionally, perhaps we should stop measuring success with insensitive indicators like revenue or patents and, instead, consider the real-life impact of innovations on human lives and the collective progress of society. Maybe it’s utopic, but the current commercialisation approach requires a serious reflection exercise – to ensure that Cambridge stays an essential cornerstone of innovation in the UK and worldwide.
Fernando Gomollón Bel
Fernando is a science communicator based in Cambridge. In 2022, he co-founded Agata Communications, a start-up focused on delivering science and innovation to the right audiences. Currently, the company is a full partner in two Horizon Europe grants funded with a total of €12 million. Specialised in science writing and storytelling, he also collaborates with popular science magazines such as Chemistry World, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.