Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
Professor Hiroaki Suga Announced as Winner of the 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry
Yuki Goto
(Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry)
Professor Hiroaki Suga of the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, has been announced as the winner of the internationally prestigious Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
Professor Hiroaki Suga
The Wolf Foundation (Israel) announced the winners of the Wolf Prize for 2023 on February 8, Japan time. This year, eight winners were selected from the five categories of Medicine, Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Arts. The three winners in the Chemistry category are Professor Hiroaki Suga, Professor Chuan He (University of Chicago), and Professor Jeffery W. Kelly (The Scripps Research Institute).
The decision to award the prize to Professor Suga is in recognition of his work on the development of RNA catalysts that revolutionize the creation of biologically active peptides. Professor Suga proposed the concept of "special peptide drug discovery," which overturned the conventional wisdom of peptide drug development, and succeeded in developing a one-of-a-kind technology to create drug candidate peptides that exhibit desired biological activity. This technology has paved the way for the recent boom in research on peptide-based middle-molecular drugs. In fact, related technologies have been transferred to major pharmaceutical companies around the world and are being implemented in society.
The Wolf Prize is awarded to scientists and artists who have achieved international excellence in chemistry, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. The Wolf Prize in Chemistry is the third Japanese recipient of the prize, following Emeritus Professor Ryoji Noyori (Nagoya University) and Distinguished University Professor Makoto Fujita (The University of Tokyo). Emeritus Professor Kunihiko Kodaira, the first Japanese recipient of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, received the prize in 1985, while the previous Wolf Prize in Physics went to Dr. Yoichiro Nambu in 1994 and Special University Professor/Special University Professor Masatoshi Koshiba in 2000.
The award ceremony will be held in Israel on June 15, 2023.
Faculty of Science News, March 2023