Nobel Prize goes to three scientists for ‘click’ chemistry

Interational Desk//

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry, report New York Times and BBC.

Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee noted.

Johan Aqvist, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said that this year’s prize dealt with “not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple.”

“Click chemistry is almost like it sounds,” he said. “It’s all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation.”

Dr. Bertozzi emphasized the importance of click therapy in medicine and “drug delivery,” which involves “doing chemistry inside living patients to make sure drugs go to the right place and not to the wrong place.”

“The field of click chemistry is still in its early phases,” she said, adding that there were “many new reactions to be discovered and invented,” as well as new applications to be found in industries like biotech, and in treating and diagnosing illnesses.

“These are areas that will be very strongly impacted by click chemistry, and they already have been,” she said.

Dr. Aqvist noted that click chemistry “can now be used for building drug molecules, polymers, new materials and many other things.”

It is the third Nobel Prize given in the sciences this week. The awards are among the highest honors in science, recognizing groundbreaking contributions in their field.