The Kurt Mislow Annual Lecture in Stereochemistry: Carolyn Bertozzi

Translational chemical biology: reaction design in the service of human health

Ask the question “what does a medicine look like?” and you will get a very different answer today than just 20 years ago.  Then, most medicines were small molecules from nature or synthetic chemistry laboratories.  Now, their molecular architectures have been expanded to include proteins, oligonucleotides, virus particles and cells, as well as creative combinations of these modalities with synthetic components.  The development of such hybrid medicines has been enabled by bioorthogonal reaction methods, which enable assembly of highly functionalized macromolecules under biocompatible conditions. This presentation will focus on new therapeutic modalities that are hybrids of synthetic and biological components: (1) antibody-enzyme conjugates for cancer immune therapy, and (2) lysosome targeting chimeras for targeted degradation of extracellular proteins.  These new constructs reflect an increasingly central role of chemistry in the design of next-generation biopharmaceuticals.