The 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, to Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and – for the second time – to Barry Sharpless of The Scripps Research Institute “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

Click chemistry, the Nobel Committee’s Olof Ramström told reporters while announcing the prize, “is almost like it sounds – it’s all about linking different molecules.”

He likened click chemistry to a seatbelt buckle, whose interlocking parts can be attached to many different materials, linking them by snapping the two parts of the buckle together.

“The problem was to find good chemical buckles,” Ramström said – chemicals that “will easily snap together, and importantly, they won’t snap with anything else.”

Tumor mutational burden (TMB), a biomarker used to assess whether a patient will respond to immunotherapy, needs to be recalculated in order to be useful for patients of Asian or African descent. Scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found a significant bias in the estimated TMB values affecting these populations and adjusted them for those patients.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 was awarded to Svante Pääbo today "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution." Pääbo, who is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues overcame extreme technical challenges to sequence the DNA of ancient hominids – because after tens of thousands of years, there is no such thing as aging well for DNA.

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new genome editing technique than can activate any gene, including those that have been silenced, allowing new drug targets and causes of drug resistance to be explored.

Investigators at Washington State University (WSU) have identified a set of eight proteins that were expressed in the serum of Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear, specifically during their hibernation period. In addition to reporting new basic insights into hibernation, the study, which was published in the Sept. 21, 2022, issue of iScience, could also give clues to insulin resistance and its relationship to body fat.

Sex differences at the cellular level could explain why men respond less well to glioblastoma (GBM) treatments, according to a study led by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSTL). The researchers found that male and female GBM tumor cells had different metabolic needs. GBM cells from male surgical samples absorbed more glutamine and had different nutritional preferences for amino acids.

Treatment with injections of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), indicated to prevent sexual maturation deficits in Down syndrome, also reduced cognitive function impairment associated with Down syndrome, also called trisomy 21. With age, about three-quarters of people with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease. They also lose their sense of smell. Both circumstances could improve with pulse doses of GnRH, according to a study led by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL) published in the Sept. 1, 2022, issue of Science.

Scientists have discovered a new antibiotic called evybactin that is able to selectively target Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB) lung infections. As described in Nature Chemical Biology on Aug. 22, 2022. the work is still at an early stage and requires further validation. But, if successful in clinical trials, evybactin could form part of a new group of specific antibiotics designed to target TB.