Nobel Prize Winner Wants to Build a Better Antibiotic
NBC Connecticut
Got a Nobel Prize? Thomas Steitz does now.
Thomas Steitz, 69, achieved an honor that most of us have never even imagined achieving -- the Nobel Prize in chemistry. And his research could affect us all because he’s working toward a whole new class of antibiotics.
Steitz is one of the three people to win the huge honor for atom-by-atom mapping of the protein-making factories within cells also happens to be a Yale professor.
He won the prize with colleagues Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, senior scientist and group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and Ada Yonath, professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize.
What he did to win the award is generate three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says their work on ribosomes has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotics.
Steitz is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, where he has taught since 1970, and he’s also attached to New Haven Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The instruction manual for the creation of proteins is DNA, but the ribosome is the machine, which takes information transcribed onto messenger RNA and turns it into proteins, according to Yale University.
Steitz’s recent work has focused on a subunit of the ribosome, which has proved to be a major target for antibiotics. That research is being used to create a whole new class of antibiotics through work his company, Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, is doing.
As with most Nobel Prize winners, this is not Steitz’s first embrace for amazing smarts and abilities. His CV lists 16 honors since 1976. Here are some of the highlights:
In 1980, he won the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry
In 1990, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2001, he won the Rosenstield Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize. In 2006, he won the Keio Medical Science Prize and in 2007, he won the Gairdner International Award.
"These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement.
Steitz and his colleagues will share the $1.4 million award.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC Connecticut
Posted Wednesday, Oct 7, 2009 - 9:40 AM EST
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