This award highlights an outstanding individual who has made a significant impact in the reagent sector.

There are always a small number of individuals in a sector who make an outstanding impact, and this award recognises those unique efforts. Past winners of this award have included Dr. Michael Comb (2018), Karen Padgett (2017), and Dr Jonathan Milner (2016).

We’re thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2019 Lifetime achievement award is Michael Weiner of Abcam. Our judges were looking for individuals who had made a significant contribution to the research reagent industry over a sustained period of time, and Michael clearly fits this requirement well. Now Vice President of Molecular Sciences at Abcam, Dr. Weiner’s life work has made a huge contribution to not only Abcam’s technology portfolio, but to the life sciences as a whole.

Nominees noted that Michael has delivered several extremely useful and well-received products into the commercial marketplace. He was the inventor of Quikchange mutagenesis (while at Stratagene, now Agilent). Quikchange and its derivatives are still the most popular method for performing protein engineering. He is an inventor of the first commercially available means for next-generation DNA sequencing and emulsion PCR (454 Life Sciences, now Roche). The Quikchange and Next Generation methods have each been separately cited in over 50,000 scientific articles.

As a serial entrepreneurial scientist, Dr Weiner has successfully founded and sold three companies: Affomix, acquired by Illumina in 2010; GnuBio, acquired by Bio-Rad in 2014; and AxioMx, acquired by Abcam in 2015. His time, innovation, and hard work with these companies have led to many ground-breaking additions to life science research.

Dr Weiner has a number of additional inventions, and through his work he has made significant contributions to the life sciences, from his co-authorship of over 50 peer-reviewed articles, development of over 30 patents and patent applications, and as the editor of three books in his areas of expertise: DNA genotyping, DNA cloning and protein expression.

Beyond his esteemed career as a scientist, Dr Weiner was selected as the Entrepreneur of the Year (2016) for Connecticut by CURE (CURE is Connecticut's Bioscience Innovation Network; the advocacy group for BioTech in CT). He continues to personally, and through his companies, give time and resources to training and mentoring multiple bioscience professionals throughout his local community of Connecticut.

Dr Andrew Chalmers, founder of CiteAb, said: “Dr Weiner has a remarkable portfolio of achievements that have furthered our sector significantly throughout his career to date. Our judges were extremely impressed by the breadth of Dr Weiner’s impact and efforts and we feel he’s a very worthy recipient of this esteemed award. Our team wishes Dr Weiner and Abcam many congratulations.”

View past winners