This year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry goes to a team of scientists who contributed to molecular medicine. The treatments they worked on could one day be injected to treat patients suffering from different types of cancer, or to create new types of materials and energy storing devices.
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa have created molecules that respond to a stimulus creating a mechanical motion that allows to perform certain tasks.
The $931,000 prize represents a reward for the possibility of creating smart medicines that look for the disease or the tissue damage in the body and send the attributed drugs to fix the problem. These types of smart materials will be created to be adaptable to changes of stimuli, such as in response to light or temperature.
The Nobel committee explained that the molecular medicine was "at the same stage as the electric motor was in the 1830s" before the team's approach. Similarly to the creation of electric trains and washing machines, this discovery unveils an endless number of uses and possibilities to incorporate this breakthrough into various aspects of technological development.
"Think of a tiny micro-robot that a doctor in the future will inject into your blood and that goes to search for a cancer cell or goes to deliver a drug, for instance," said Feringa, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Sauvage is a professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg and director of research emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. He started this line of research in 1983, when he linked two ring-shaped molecules to form a chain (catenane), through a mechanical bond.
He was followed by Stoddart, who threaded a molecular ring through a molecular axle, proving that the first would move along the latter. Feringa was, in 1999, the first person to create a molecular motor.
Together, the team managed to bring the molecular systems intro energy-filled states where their motion can be controlled, instead of just being in a state of equilibrium.
Chemistry is the third of this year's Nobel Prizes. The first two were awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for Medicine and a team of British scientists for Physics.
"The development of computing demonstrates how the miniaturization of technology can lead to a revolution. The 2016 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have miniaturized machines and taken chemistry to a new dimension," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
