Jason Chin awarded 2026 Heinrich Wieland Prize
Prof Jason Chin, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford’s Department of Chemistry and Executive Director of the Generative Biology Institute at the Ellison Institute of Technology, has been named the 2026 recipient of the Heinrich Wieland Prize.
Awarded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung, the international prize recognises outstanding research on biologically active molecules and systems. Professor Chin will receive the €250,000 award for pioneering contributions to synthetic biology, particularly his work engineering cells to biosynthesise unnatural proteins and polymers with properties not found in nature.
Every living cell reads the same genetic code: a near-universal set of instructions, conserved across billions of years of evolution, that translates DNA sequence into proteins built from 20 canonical amino acids. Jason Chin set out to rewrite that code.
He created a bacterial strain with the largest synthetic genome ever produced, in which the genetic code was compressed, freeing up individual codons for new purposes. In parallel, he engineered a new cellular translation machinery capable of incorporating entirely novel chemical building blocks into proteins. Combining both, he programmed cells to produce new classes of molecules – protein polymers containing non-canonical amino acids, entirely artificial polymers, and macrocycles that are of considerable interest in drug development.
Rather than optimizing existing biology, Jason Chin redesigned the fundamental information architecture of life itself. His approach has become the world’s most widely used method for this purpose.
He was also the first to extend this technology beyond bacteria to mammalian cells and whole living organisms. Most recently, he chemically rewrote a human chromosome and thus made a significant step toward synthetic human chromosomes with far-reaching potential for treating genetic disease.
Previous winners of the Heinrich Wieland Prize include Carolyn Bertozzi, Peter G. Schultz and Gero Miesenböck.
The award ceremony will take place in Munich, Germany, on 5 November 2026. Programme and link to registration until 15 October 2026.
