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Morten Peter Meldal is a chemist at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022 for his contribution to the click chemistry approach of building molecules. Meldal earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), working on the synthetic chemistry of oligosaccharides. Meldal developed techniques and instruments for peptide synthesis and invented several PEG-based resins. The company Betamab Therapeutics (which ceased operations in 2021) was cofounded by Meldal in 2019, to develop beta-bodies, peptides that imitate antibodies.
Meldal and his collaborator, Christian Tornøe, discovered the azide-alkyne reaction known as the prototype of click chemistry by accident at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Valby, Denmark in 2001. The reaction was independently discovered by American chemist K. Barry Sharpless. Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless laid the foundation for click chemistry, an approach to building molecules in which molecular building blocks join together quickly and efficiently.
Meldal is known for his work on poly-ethyleneglycol (PEG) based resins, used in peptide biology, that have a unique amphipathic nature, having both polar and nonpolar portions, and swelling behavior in nonpolar organic solvents and aqueous buffers. Meldal is known for his work on peptides, small strings of amino acids. Meldal was a pioneer of organozymes, peptide-organic molecules that behave similarly to enzyme-like chiral catalysts on solid support. Chemically tagged glycopeptides developed by Meldal have been used to study the immunological response to cancer-related mucins.
Morten Meldal, K. Barry Sharpless, and Carolyn Bertozzi were awarded the 2022 Nobel prize in Chemistry for their development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Click chemistry is a way to link molecules together efficiently to produce reliable products. Bioorthogonal chemistry allows the chemical reactions to occur in living cells. Sharpless first proposed the idea of click chemistry in 2001. Meldal's and Sharpless’s research teams each independently discovered that copper ions could be used to initiate a reaction between an azide molecule and an alkyne molecule. Bertozzi and her colleagues developed click reactions that didn’t require copper, which is toxic to living cells. The technology is used to track molecules inside living cells and to develop therapeutics based on “clickable antibodies”.
Click chemistry allows clickable azides to be added to polymers so that the polymers can be decorated with chemical groups that give useful properties, such as electrical conductivity. Click chemistry is used to tag biomolecules with fluorescent probes to study the inner workings of cells and to produce antibody-drug conjugates that have therapeutic action at specific targets in the body.
