Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for solving a mystery of asymmetry in living organisms that is crucial to the development of effective medicines. Their breakthroughs paved the way for the manufacture of drugs to target molecular structures in the human body that could theoretically exist in two possible mirror-image forms, but are found in only one of them. This structural biological bias — known as handedness — can be critical to efforts to combat disease since potential treatments that do not take it into account could be useless or even harmful. “Just like dancing partners must match, chemistry depends on molecules coming together in the right way,” Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society, said of the duo’s win. “Their discoveries gave chemists unprecedented control over that process, enabling advances in medicines, materials and so much more.”
The pair’s triumph, announced on Wednesday, means they will share a SKr12mn ($1.2mn) prize. The chemical reactions they developed were “spectacular”, said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. The winners’ work flows from the way some molecules are asymmetrical because of how elements within them are arranged. They can exist in two forms identical in their elemental make-up, but be structurally different because they cannot be transposed on to each other — just like human hands. Chemists call the phenomenon chirality, from the Greek word for hand. Vital substances in the body such as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are homochiral — that is, they exist in only one of the two possible chiral forms.
“Many of the molecules in our bodies, including proteins that drugs target, are themselves chiral,” said Andre Cobb, professor of organic chemistry at King’s College London. “So the ‘left-handed’ and ‘right-handed’ versions of a drug can interact with the body in different ways, which can lead to different or weakened drug effects.” The scandal of the drug thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s is a horrifying example of the impact that changes in chirality can have on the human body. One chiral form of the drug had the intended effect of easing morning sickness in pregnant women, but the other caused severe birth defects such as brain damage and limb deformities. Kagan, an emeritus professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, took the essential first step 40 years ago by discovering a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, the Nobel committee said. These proved it was possible to create one chiral in form in much greater quantities relative to the other than had previously been thought possible.
Almost 10 years later, Soai, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University of Science, designed the first reaction with the potential to make homochiral products. Eight years after that, he succeeded in doing so: a feat only ever previously achieved by living systems. The power of chirality hit the scientific headlines again when a group of scientists raised the alarm in 2024 about the potential to create so-called mirror life. These would be synthetic bacteria of the opposite handedness to their naturally occurring forms, with the potential to overwhelm the immune systems of living organisms unfamiliar with them. The researchers argued that advances in synthetic biology meant it might be possible to make mirror life within a generation. The warning has sparked debate over how grave the mirror life threat really would be — and whether there are other more immediate biological dangers that it would be better to prioritise.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing