Last week, the Nobel prize announced winners of its chemistry prize. This year three chemistry visionaries shared it jointly for their work on the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry—Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal, and Carolyn Bertozzi.
“Click chemistry” aligns with the Nobel Prize Teams’ 2022 focus of simplifying chemistry’s complexity and making difficult processes easier, more reliable and with less unwanted byproducts. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal laid the click chemistry foundation in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently, whilst Carolyn Bertozzi took the form to a new dimension and started utilizing it in living organisms. Medal best distilled the utility and the simplicity of the reaction as building complex structures and linking them together like Legos.
The field of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry has wide applicability for drug discovery, particularly with regard to bioconjugation, an increasingly relevant concept supporting existing (e.g. antibody drug conjugates) and driving new drug modalities. It can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases more precisely. In addition to it currently being harnessed to improve the targeting of cancer pharmaceuticals now being tested in clinical trials, click also holds promise with a host of health, agricultural and industrial applications.
Dotmatics’ biological registration system includes click chemistry capabilities. It can automate creating click chemistry crosslinking between components of a registration record. User-defined click monomers enable cycloaddition chemistry methods and are extendable to include other types of click chemistry reactions. These tools enable high-throughput record creation and ensure the fidelity of those molecular designs utilizing click-crosslinks.
Congratulations to the three 2022 Nobel Prize winners for chemistry and for all the winners for their scientific work and achievement. We're honored to be working with many of these Nobel Laureate organizations.