Three scientists share the Nobel prize: Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”
More specifically, Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 because they brought chemistry into the era of functionalism and laid the foundations of click chemistry. They share the prize with Carolyn Bertozzi, who took click chemistry to a new dimension and began using it to map cells. Her bioorthogonal reactions are now contributing to more targeted cancer treatments, among many other applications
“What’s unique about click chemistry is that the two reagents, in the presence of hundreds of thousands of different types of molecules, they will only seek out each other and only give one product,” said Jiong Yang, a program director at the National Institute of General Medical Science who oversees Dr. Sharpless’s work. “That’s the basis of all this technical development.”
Click chemistry already being used to create new drugs and materials
Click chemistry is as it sounds — the process of snapping molecular building blocks together to build larger and more complex molecules. Sharpless coined the term around the year 2000, shortly before he received his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001, referring to simple and reliable chemical reactions that avoid unwanted by-products.
Working independently, Meldal and Sharpless later presented the first click chemical reaction – the copper catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition.
Click chemistry has already had a major impact on medical research and materials sciences. The concept has been used to build new drug molecules, polymers and materials.
The field is still in its early days, but prize co-winner Bertozzi said "there are many new reactions to be discovered and invented." Click chemistry can be used to click in substances that conduct electricity, capture sunlight, are antibacterial, protect from ultraviolet radiation or have other desirable properties.
Bioorthogonal reactions great boon for medicine
Bertozzi took click chemistry to a new level by using the concept to create reactions inside living organisms. She called them biorthogonal reactions, which refers to a reaction that occurs in living systems without disrupting their native processes.
Bertozzi first used the technique to visualize glycans, a type of molecule that coats the surface of cells. She used click chemistry to study how glycans behave under the microscope.
As with click chemistry, biorthogonal reactions have already been widely applied in chemistry, biology, and medical research. "There are two main types of applications of biorthogonal reactions. One is as a discovery tool to discover new molecules. The second impact is in medicine, particularly drug delivery, like making sure drugs go to the right place and away from the wrong places," Bertozzi said.
In winning the award on Wednesday, Dr. Sharpless became only the fifth person to win two Nobels, having received the chemistry prize in 2001 for his work on chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions. The other two-time winners were Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger. Dr. Bertozzi also became the eighth woman to be awarded the chemistry prize, the latest since Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna in 2020.
Comments