Winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry Announced
The winners of the of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were officially announced earlier this week. One half was awarded to Frances H. Arnold “for the directed evolution of enzymes”, and the other half jointly to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P Winter “for the phage display of peptides and antibodies,” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated in a release.
Frances H. Arnold is an American chemical engineer, biological engineer, and biochemist. She is currently a Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry and Director of the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center at the California Institute of Technology. She conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes – the proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. She has since refined the methods that are now routinely used to develop new catalysts.
George P. Smith is a professor at the University of Missouri. He developed a method known as phage display in 1985. Phage display occurs when a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) can be used to evolve new proteins. Sir Gregory P. Winter is a British biochemist from the University of Cambridge. He used the method of phage display for the directed evolution of antibodies with the aim of producing new pharmaceuticals. The first medication developed using this method was approved in 2002 to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel diseases.
