Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 5 for their work on ‘click chemistry’ and ‘bioorthogonal reactions’.
Click chemistry means “linking chemicals together”, while bioorthogonal reactions take click chemistry to living cells which might be helpful in cancer treatment, diagnostics and delivery of drugs.
Sharpless was awarded the Nobel prize for the first time in 2001 for his work on ‘chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions’. He introduced Click Chemistry to make reactions between molecules fuss-free. But it must occur in the presence of oxygen and water, which is cheap and environmentally friendly.
Subsequently, Meldal demonstrated a chemical reaction that found applications in pharmaceuticals and other materials. Meldal’s and Sharpeless’ labs showed that adding copper to ‘azide’ and ‘alkyne’ speeds up the reaction. It gave rise to a product called ‘triazole’ which is useful in pharmaceuticals, dyes and agricultural chemicals, according to the Nobel Committee.
Since copper is toxic to living beings Bertozzi proposed bioorthogonal reactions which allow click chemistry within living cells without needing a metal by twisting the shape of alkyne, allowing it to become more reactive. Bioorthogonal reactions helped Bertozzi map complex sugar structures lining cells called glycans.
Glycans protect tumors from the body’s immune system and Bertozzi developed a type of biological pharmaceutical to block glycan’s protective function.This potential anti-cancer drug is now being tested in clinical trials on people with advanced cancer
