Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the creators of click and bioorthogonal chemistry

First modification: 05/10/2022 – 14:42

the americans Carolyn Bertozzi Y K. Barry Sharpless and the dane Morten P. Meldal were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of click and bioorthogonal chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on October 5.

Click chemistry allows molecules to “lock together” in the same way as a snap. The concept was introduced in the early 2000s by Sharpless, who became the fifth person to receive a second Nobel Prize.

The Academy reported that with the development achieved so far, these laureate scientists have contributed to improving cancer drugs.

The work of this year’s winners “expands the frontiers (of chemistry) and has a great impact on science and society,” the Nobel organization stressed.

Click chemistry is used in developing pharmaceuticals, mapping DNA, and creating materials that are more fit for purpose. “Using bioorthogonal reactions, researchers have improved the targeting of anticancer pharmaceuticals,” the Swedish Academy explained, adding that the award rewards work that tries to “make difficult processes easier.”

“Click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions have brought chemistry into the era of functionalism,” the Academy added in its statement, adding that “for a long time, chemists have been driven by the desire to build ever more complicated molecules. . In pharmaceutical research, this has often involved the artificial recreation of natural molecules with medicinal properties.”

Barry Sharpless, who introduced this concept in the early 2000s to enable rapid product synthesis, had already been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his discoveries on the technique of asymmetric catalysis.

“I am absolutely shocked. I can hardly breathe,” Bertozzi said when contacted by the jury. The scientist thus becomes the eighth woman to win the chemistry prize, succeeding the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the American Jennifer Doudna.

a historic award

Last year, the Swedish Academy Prize was awarded to Germany’s Benjamin List and Britain’s David MacMillan for advancing a new tool for building molecules, “asymmetric organocatalysis.”

The year before, in 2020, two women, French Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna, received the award for the concept of “molecular scissors”.

Previous winners of the prize include renowned scientific names such as the French researcher and scientist Marie Curie (1867-1934), who also shared the physics prize with her husband, Pierre Curie (1859-1906), and whose eldest daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956), won the chemistry prize just over 20 years after his mother.

The Nobel prizes in science, literature and peace were created by the will of the inventor of dynamite and Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel, also a chemist, and have been awarded since 1901. Economics was added later.

Since the beginning of the last century, the prizes have been awarded every year with only a few interruptions, especially during the two world wars. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were no interruptions although some of the events were held online.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the third of the Nobel prizes to be revealed. Follow the medicine and physics ones announced earlier this week. The announcements will continue on Thursday with the one on literature, on Friday the one on peace will be announced and next Monday the one on economy.

With Reuters, AFP and EFE