Two decades after discovering a new way to construct molecules, David MacMillan and Benjamin List win Nobel Prize
Catalysts play a vital role in drug development, driving complex sequences of chemical reactions to break down molecules or join them together. But until just a couple of decades ago, only two types of catalysts were known to scientists: metals and enzymes.
Metal catalysts are easily destroyed by moisture, so while it’s simple enough to deploy them in a lab, large-scale manufacturing becomes a challenge. Enzymes, on the other hand, consist of hundreds of amino acids, though frequently enough, only a few of those are actually involved in a chemical reaction.
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