Reacción a "Reactions to Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Bertozzi, Meldal and Sharpless for click chemistry and its use in living organisms"

With the discovery at the turn of the century of a catalytic methodology for coupling azides and alkynes under mild conditions, simple to execute and easy to scale up, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless laid the foundations of what Sharpless christened "click chemistry". It was precisely this idea of a "molecular layman", accessible to those inexperienced in synthesis, that led to an unstoppable expansion of the methodology beyond organic chemistry, contributing to the advancement of areas of knowledge such as medicinal chemistry, biochemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, etc. Moreover, following the pioneering contribution of Meldal and Sharpless, the concept of "click chemistry" has been extended to more than a dozen organic reactions that continue to enrich the arsenal of useful and practical molecular tools for the scientific community.

Carolyn Bertozzi elegantly extrapolated the simplicity of click chemistry to the complexity of biological media. Using tensile alkynes and eliminating the metal catalysts needed for the Meldal and Sharpless reactions, she carried out for the first time chemical reactions capable of covalently linking cells, fluorescent markers, monoclonal antibodies, nanoparticles or therapeutic agents. This approach has been a true revolution not only for the advancement of biomedical research, but also for the development of new drugs. This year's Nobel Prize is recognition of simple but effective chemistry.