The Prince of Asturias Foundation bestows the Prince of Asturias Award (Spanish: Premios Príncipe de Asturias) for Scientific and Technical Research annually for work that represents a significant contribution to the progress and welfare of mankind. Gregory P. Winter (left), University of Cambridge, UK, and Richard A. Lerner (right), Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA, have been announced as winners of the 2012 award, and were honored for their contribution to the field of immunology through their research on antibodies. The Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, in the second fortnight of October.

Gregory P. Winter studied at the University of Cambridge, UK, and carried out his Ph.D. at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK. After postdoctoral work at Imperial College London, UK, and at the LMB, he joined the scientific staff there in 1981, and was Deputy Director from 2006–2011. He became Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 2012. Winter was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990, and was knighted in 2004. He was honored for his work on the humanization of antibodies so they are not rejected by the human immune system.

Richard A. Lerner studied at Northwestern University and Stanford University Medical School, both USA, where he received his MD degree in 1964. He joined the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, La Jolla, USA, in 1965. He is currently Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry and Institute Professor, as well as a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, at the Scripps Research Institute, USA. Lerner received the prize for his research on combinatorial antibody libraries.
Lerner is on the International Advisory Board of Angewandte Chemie.

• Bicyclic Peptides with Optimized Ring Size Inhibit Human Plasma Kallikrein and its Orthologues While Sparing Paralogous Proteases,
  V. Baeriswyl, H. Rapley, L. Pollaro, C. Stace, D. Teufel, E. Walker, S. Chen, G. Winter, J. Tite, C. Heinis,
  ChemMedChem 2012, 7, 1173.
  DOI: 10.1002/cmdc.201200071
• Manufacturing Immunity to Disease in a Test Tube: The Magic Bullet Realized,
  R. A. Lerner,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 8106.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200603381