Winter said he was surprised by the huge commercial success of antibody drugs, which he put down in large part to the high prices that drug companies have managed to charge for them.
“I had no idea they would be so commercially successful . . . it was a complete paradigm shift,” he told reporters in a conference call. “Antibodies as a pharmaceutical product are still growing great guns.”
The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created and funded in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.
For the first time in decades, the Nobel line-up did not feature a literature award after a rift within the Swedish Academy over a rape scandal involving the husband of a board member left it unable to select a winner.
The science and peace prizes are selected by other bodies. Chemistry is the third of this year’s Nobel Prizes after the winners of the medicine and physics awards were announced earlier this week.
