Three scientists are sharing this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research institute in La Jolla, California,and Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry – click chemistry – in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. Stanford University’s Carolyn Bertozzi has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilizing it in living organisms.
To map important but elusive biomolecules on the surface of cells – glycans – Professor Bertozzi developed click reactions that work inside living organisms. Her bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell. These reactions are now used globally to explore cells and track biological processes. Using bioorthogonal reactions, researchers have improved the targeting of cancer pharmaceuticals, which are now being tested in clinical trials.
Carolyn Bertozzi is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2015 after teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Bertozzi received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.