CAMBRIDGE, England–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Constructive Bio’s founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Professor Jason Chin, has been named the recipient of the 2026 Heinrich Wieland Prize, one of Europe’s most prestigious honours for fundamental research in the life sciences. The award places Professor Chin among past laureates, including five Nobel Prize winners, and recognises the genetic-code-expansion technology now being applied to next-generation therapeutics, including GLP-1s.
The award, presented by the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung, recognises his pioneering contributions to synthetic biology, particularly his engineering of cells to biosynthesise unnatural proteins and polymers with properties absent in nature.
Professor Chin is best known for his scientific breakthrough in genetic code expansion, through the creation of synthetic bacterial genomes with compressed genetic codes. This involves rewriting the fundamental instructions cells use to build molecules, allowing them to create entirely new classes of proteins and polymers that nature alone cannot make. His methodology has become the most widely used approach worldwide for biosynthesising non-natural proteins and polymers.
In 2022, Professor Chin founded Constructive Bio to translate these advances into scalable applications across therapeutics. Today, the company is applying its platform to pharmaceutical discovery and manufacturing, enabling both novel therapeutic candidates and more scalable routes to complex molecules such as GLP-1s. As Chief Scientific Officer, he continues to play a central role in shaping the company’s scientific direction and platform development.
Previous Heinrich Wieland Prize laureates include Michael Brown, Joseph Goldstein, Bengt Samuelsson, James Rothman and Carolyn Bertozzi.
Ola Wlodek, CEO of Constructive Bio, said:
“Jason’s work has fundamentally changed what biology can be asked to do. What began as a profound scientific question about whether the genetic code could be rewritten has become the foundation for entirely new capabilities in drug discovery and manufacturing. This award is a fitting recognition of the originality and significance of that work, and we are proud to be building on its foundations at Constructive Bio.”
Greg Winter, Chair of the Board of Constructive Bio, said:
“Jason has had a long-term strategic vision for much of his scientific career – to unfreeze the genetic code. This has required his development of methods for the synthesis of entire bacterial genomes in which degenerate codons can be reassigned to non-coding amino acids (ncAA), and for the creation of new cellular translation machinery to generate proteins and peptides with novel properties by incorporation of ncAA. Jason’s work is leading to a new era in protein engineering.
Constructive Bio is dedicated to making Jason’s technologies and vision an industrial and commercial success. The company has developed a highly productive Syn61 bacterial strain for fermentation of ncAA products containing up to three different ncAAs at multi-gram-per-litre scale. Peptides with ncAA that previously had to be made by chemical synthesis can now be made by fermentation, avoiding chemical waste and at much lower costs. Already the company has created a set of potent and DPPIV-resistant GLP-1 agonists and is exploring other applications with both peptides and proteins.
These promising developments remind me of how the application of recombinant DNA technology led to the transformation of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry by therapeutic antibodies. At Constructive Bio we congratulate the scientific recognition given to Jason by the Heinrich Wieland Prize, and we look forward to working with Jason and with our industrial partners to spearhead its impact on medicine.“
Jason Chin, Chief Scientific Officer, said:
“It is a great honour to receive the Heinrich Wieland Prize. This recognition reflects the work of many exceptional students, postdocs and collaborators over many years. We were motivated by a simple question: can the rules we thought were fixed in biology be systematically changed? It is exciting to see these ideas now finding broader application in science, and increasingly in the development of useful new therapeutics and materials.”
Contacts
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