Cambridge, England — Constructive Bio founder and Chief Scientific Officer Professor Jason Chin has been named the recipient of the 2026 Heinrich Wieland Prize for his contributions to synthetic biology and genetic code expansion.
The award, presented by the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung, is one of Europe’s leading honors for fundamental life sciences research. Previous recipients include Nobel laureates Michael Brown, Joseph Goldstein, Bengt Samuelsson, James Rothman and Carolyn Bertozzi.
Chin was recognized for developing technology that enables cells to produce unnatural proteins and polymers with properties not found in nature. His work includes creating synthetic bacterial genomes with compressed genetic codes, allowing cells to manufacture new classes of biological molecules.
The approach has become widely used in the biosynthesis of non-natural proteins and polymers.
In 2022, Chin founded Constructive Bio to develop commercial applications for the technology. The company is using its platform in pharmaceutical discovery and manufacturing, including the production of therapeutic candidates and complex molecules such as GLP-1s.
“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,” said Ola Wlodek, CEO of Constructive Bio.
Sir Gregory Winter, a member of Constructive Bio’s board, said the company has developed a highly productive Syn61 bacterial strain capable of fermenting products containing up to three different non-canonical amino acids at multigram-per-liter scale.
“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,” Winter 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,” Chin said.
