This year’s 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded in equal parts to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for developing way of “snapping molecules toget”
Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi (born October 10, 1966) is a prolific American chemist and Nobel laureate known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology.
She coined the term “bioorthogonal chemistry” for chemical reactions compatible with living systems
Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they impact diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19.
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Current position/post she holding
she holding At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences.[4] Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)and is the former Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Awards
She received the MacArthur “genius” award at age 33. In 2010, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize faculty award.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the National Academy of Inventors (2013). In 2014, it was announced that Bertozzi would lead ACS Central Science, the American Chemical Society’s first peer-reviewed open access journal, which offers all content free to the public.
Bertozzi was awarded one third of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless, “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”
Education
Bertozzi completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at University of California, Berkeley in 1993 with Mark Bednarski, working on the chemical synthesis of oligosaccharide analogs.
While at Berkeley, she discovered that viruses can bind to sugars in the body.
The discovery led her to her current field of research, glycobiology.
During Bertozzi’s third year of graduate school, Bednarski was diagnosed with colon cancer, which resulted in him taking a leave of absence and changing his career path by enrolling in medical school. This left Bertozzi and the rest of the lab to complete their Ph.D. work with no direct supervision.
Career and research
After graduating from Berkeley with a Ph.D., Bertozzi was a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with Steven Rosen, where she studied the activity of endothelial oligosaccharides in promoting cell adhesion at inflammation sites
While working with Rosen at UCSF, Bertozzi was able to modify the protein and sugar molecules in the walls of living cells so that the cells accept foreign materials such as implants.
Bertozzi joined the Berkeley faculty in 1996. She has been an investigator with HHMI since 2000. In 1999, while working with HHMI and at Berkeley, she founded the field of bioorthogonal chemistry and coined the term in 2003. This new field and technique allows researchers to chemically modify molecules in living organisms and not interrupt the processes of the cell. In 2015, Bertozzi moved to Stanford University to join the ChEM-H Institute.
Bertozzi studies the glycobiology of underlying diseases such as cancer, inflammatory disorders such as arthritis, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. In particular, Bertozzi has advanced the understanding of cell surface oligosaccharides involved in cell recognition and inter-cellular communication.
Bertozzi has applied the techniques of bioorthogonal chemistry to study glycocalyx, the sugars that surround the cell membrane. Her discoveries have advanced the field of biotherapeutics.
Her lab has also developed tools for research. One such development is creating chemical tools for studying glycans in living systems . Her lab’s development of nanotechnologies which probe biological systems lead to the development of a fast point-of-care tuberculosis test in 2018.
Biotechnology startups
In addition to her academic work, Bertozzi works actively with biotechnology start-ups.
In the early 2000s, Bertozzi and Steve Rosen co-founded Thios Pharmaceuticals the first company to target sulfation pathways.
In the early 2000s, Bertozzi and Steve Rosen co-founded Thios Pharmaceuticals the first company to target sulfation pathways.
In 2008, Bertozzi founded a startup of her own: Redwood Bioscience of Emeryville, California. Redwood Bioscience is a biotechnology company that uses SMARTag, a site-specific protein modification technology that allows small drugs to attach to sites on the proteins and can be used to help fight cancers.
Redwood Bioscience was acquired by Catalent Pharma Solutions in 2014
In 2014, she co-founded Enable Biosciences which focuses on biotechnologies for at-home diagnoses for type 1 diabetes, HIV, and other diseases.
Bertozzi became a co-founder of Palleon Pharma of Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2015. Palleon Pharma focuses on investigating glycoimmune checkpoint inhibitors as a potential treatment for cancer.
In 2017, Bertozzi helped found InterVenn Biosciences, which uses mass spectrometry and artificial intelligence to enhance glycoproteomics for target and biomarker discovery, ovarian cancer diagnostics, and predicting the successes and failures of clinical trials.
She co-founded Grace Science Foundation in 2018. The foundation focuses on curing NGLY1 deficiency through developing therapeutics that are efficient and inexpensive.
In 2019 she co-founded both OliLux Biosciences and Lycia Therapeutics. OliLux Biosciences develops new methods for tuberculosis detection.
The founding of Lycia Therapeutics occurred when Bertozzi’s group discovered lysosome-targeting chimeras (LYTACs).
Dr. Bertozzi has also previously served on the research advisory board of several pharmaceutical companies including GlaxoSmithKline, and until recently Eli Lilly
Awards and honors.
1987 – Phi Beta Kappa.
1997 – Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
1997 – Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry.
1998 – Glaxo Wellcome Scholars’ Award.
1998 – Beckman Young Investigators Award.
1999 – Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society.
1999 – Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
1999 – MacArthur Fellowship.
2000 – Presidential Early Career Awards for Science and Engineering.
2000 – Merck Academic Development Program Award.
2001 – UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.
2001 – ACS Award in Pure Chemistry.
2001 – Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
2002 – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[citation needed]
2002 – Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award of the Protein Society.
2003 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2004 – Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award of Iota Sigma Pi[citation needed]
2005 – Havinga Medal, Univ. Leiden[citation needed]
2005 – Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
2005 – T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professorship in Chemistry.
2007 – Ernst Schering Prize.
2007 – LGBTQ Scientist of the Year Award – from the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals
2008 – Li Ka Shing Women in Science Award.
2008 – Roy L. Whistler International Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry
2008 – Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
2008 – Willard Gibbs Award
2009 – William H. Nichols Medal.
2009 – Harrison Howe Award.
2009 – Albert Hofmann Medal, Univ. Zurich.
2010 – Lemelson-MIT Prize
2010 – Royal Society of Chemistry – Organic Division, Bioorganic Chemistry Award
2011 – Member of the Institute of Medicine.
2011 – Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry.
2011 – Emanuel Merck Lectureship.
2012 – Honorary Doctorate of Science from Brown University
2012 – Heinrich Wieland Prize.
2013 – Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
2013 – Hans Bloemendal Award.
2015 – UCSF 150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Awards.
2017 – Arthur C. Cope Award.
2018 – Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS).
2020 – John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science.
2020 – Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize.
2020 – F. A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research.
2022 – Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
2022 – Welch Award in Chemistry
2022 – Dr H. P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics|
2022 – Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University
2022 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Personal life
Carolyn Bertozzi grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. She has two sisters, one of whom, Andrea Bertozzi, is on the mathematics faculty at UCLA. Her father, William Bertozzi, was a physics professor at MIT. Growing up, Bertozzi and her two sisters grew up around science. Because their father was a physics professor, when asked what her and her sisters wanted to be when grown up, the answer was unanimous: a nuclear physicist. The three girls would attend MIT camps, as their father dreamt that they would attend MIT due to a “mixture of pride and the promise of free tuition.” To William’s dismay, Carolyn attended Harvard instead because the school offered strengths outside of just science. She was not the first to stray, though, her older sister, Andrea, attended Princeton University. Bertozzi briefly considered a career in music. In high school, she won several awards for music compositions and musical accomplishments. Her talent on the keyboard earned her offers as a music major from several university rock bands, but she felt that she was “always centered on the sciences.”