Car­olyn Bertozzi, pre­dict­ed by some to be­come a No­bel lau­re­ate, clinched one of the world’s top awards in the wee hours of Wednes­day, win­ning the No­bel Prize in Chem­istry along­side a re­peat win­ner and a Copen­hagen re­searcher.

The Stan­ford pro­fes­sor, Morten Mel­dal of Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen and 2001 awardee K. Bar­ry Sharp­less of Scripps shared the prize equal­ly. The No­bel is some­times split in quar­ters and/or halves.

“I am ab­solute­ly stunned. I am sit­ting here and can hard­ly breathe,” Bertozzi said to the com­mit­tee in the mid­dle of the night Cal­i­for­nia time. “I’m still not en­tire­ly pos­i­tive that it’s re­al, but it’s get­ting re­al by the minute.”

The in-the-mo­ment re­ac­tion was re­flect­ed sim­i­lar­ly in her in­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with her lab group. The sub­ject line: “I can’t be­lieve it’s re­al.” The body of the note: “Ap­par­ent­ly it is!”

Sharp­less and Mel­dal won for their con­tri­bu­tions to so-called click chem­istry. Bertozzi el­e­vat­ed the find­ings by find­ing click re­ac­tions that weren’t tox­ic to cells and made “chem­i­cal re­ac­tions that don’t in­ter­fere with the nor­mal bio­chem­istry of life. This now al­lows us to at­tach all kinds of mol­e­cules to bi­o­log­i­cal ones,” the Roy­al Swedish Acad­e­my of Sci­ences said in its an­nounce­ment.

Bertozzi, the new­ly-mint­ed No­bel lau­re­ate, spear­head­ed the field of bioorthog­o­nal chem­istry to help map cells. She joins just sev­en oth­er women grant­ed the award — out of 191 lau­re­ates — in­clud­ing CRISPR pi­o­neers Jen­nifer Doud­na and Em­manuelle Char­p­en­tier for their ground­break­ing Cas9 gene edit­ing work that has el­e­vat­ed both to new heights and made Doud­na a house­hold name in some cir­cles.

Sharp­less joins a lim­it­ed club of re­peat win­ners: John Bardeen (’56, ’72), Marie Curie (’03, ’11), Li­nus Paul­ing (’54, ’62) and Fred­er­ick Sanger (’58, ’80). The No­bel com­mit­tee deemed Sharp­less the orig­i­na­tor of the “click chem­istry” con­cept, which they de­scribed as “sim­ple and re­li­able chem­istry” that al­low re­ac­tions to hap­pen fast and avoid un­de­sired byprod­ucts.

He and Mel­dal in­de­pen­dent­ly put to­geth­er the “crown jew­el” of click: the cop­per cat­alyzed azide-alkyne cy­cload­di­tion. The chem­i­cal re­ac­tion plays out in the de­vel­op­ment of drugs, map­ping DNA and cre­at­ing new ma­te­ri­als, the No­bel com­mit­tee wrote.

In comes Bertozzi, who es­ca­lat­ed the work of Mel­dal and Sharp­less by map­ping gly­cans, bio­mol­e­cules on the sur­face of cells. Her de­vel­op­ments, in­clud­ing a met­al-free click re­ac­tion, work in­side hu­mans. The re­search is at the heart of new treat­ments be­ing test­ed in clin­i­cal tri­als to­day.

In sum­ma­ry, the trio’s find­ings have “tak­en chem­istry in­to the era of func­tion­al­ism.” On the press and com­mit­tee call right af­ter the an­nounce­ment, Bertozzi said bioorthog­o­nal and click chem­istry are “still in its ear­ly phas­es” and that the im­pacts will be seen in biotech and phar­ma for years to come.

Bertozzi’s work has led to the foun­da­tion of nine biotechs (a fig­ure she tal­lied up pri­or to an in­ter­view with End­points News in May), in­clud­ing Palleon Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, In­ter­Venn, Ly­cia Ther­a­peu­tics and oth­ers. The lat­ter came to­geth­er out of a 24-hour hum­drum of ven­ture cap­i­tal in­ter­est af­ter she tweet­ed out a preprint her group had post­ed on Chem­Rx­iv that de­scribed LY­TACs, she pre­vi­ous­ly re­called to End­points.

Asked by re­porters what ap­pli­ca­tions of her she thinks are mak­ing a lot of im­pact, she said in med­i­cine, the main one is the de­liv­ery of ther­a­peu­tics “to make sure that drugs go to the right place and stay away from the wrong place.”

Bertozzi di­rects Stan­ford’s Sarafan ChEM-H, short for Chem­istry, En­gi­neer­ing, and Med­i­cine for Hu­man Health. She in­flu­ences the next gen­er­a­tion as a teacher but al­so as a par­ent who helps with her chil­dren’s sci­ence fair projects. Mu­si­cal in­ter­ests pop­u­late her free time as she en­joys play­ing pop, rock n’ roll and jazz songs on the pi­ano, and oc­ca­sion­al­ly “keep[s] up with karaoke nights at some of the clubs in San Fran­cis­co.” She’s al­so a self-pro­claimed “fit­ness buff.”

The Howard Hugh­es Med­ical In­sti­tute in­ves­ti­ga­tor has al­so co-found­ed Grace Sci­ence, a biotech that is at­tempt­ing to trans­late re­search out of the Grace Sci­ence Foun­da­tion to cre­ate treat­ments for NG­LY1 de­fi­cien­cy and oth­er in­di­ca­tions. Bertozzi has served on the Eli Lil­ly board of di­rec­tors and re­search ad­vi­so­ry board at GSK.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.