Prix Nobel de chimie

ESSAY ON NOBEL LAUREATES FOR CHEMISTRY

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 with her colleague, the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna. Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics and biochemistry. She worked first as a university teaching assistant at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Then she went to the US, to work as an assistant research scientist. She published many paper on the regulation of hair growth in mice. After that she came back in Europe where she worked in different labs across the continent. In 2015 Charpentier accepted an offer from the German Max Planck Society to become a scientific member of the society and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. The Nobel Prize received was the first science Nobel ever won by two women.

This price awarded their unexpected discovery. It results from Emmanuelle Charpentier's team's understanding of the molecular mechanisms of what defends bacteria against aggression by viruses. Its name is CRISPR-Cas9. The CRISPR-Cas9 system is a real molecular scissors that enables the DNA to be cut and modified at specific points in the genome. Although tools for modifying DNA previously existed, this is a revolution because this new system is so simple, precise and has been very quickly adopted by the life science research community. It enables a gene to be inactivated, controlled or modified, thus opening up new avenues for understanding the molecular mechanisms within cells or developing new therapeutic approaches.

This discovery represents a great hope in the development of treatments for hereditary pathologies linked to the mutation of a simple gene. This technique, applied in the context of gene therapy, could be a means of modifying, turning off or restoring the full functionality of a gene and thus treating the resulting pathology. This system is also promising for the development of new cancer immunotherapies.

...