Morten Meldal

University of Copenhagen

Morten P. Meldal is a Danish chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Carolyn Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Meldal independently discovered the copper-catalysed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC), concurrently with but separately from Sharpless and Valery Fokin; this reaction joins an azide and a terminal alkyne into a stable 1,2,3-triazole quickly, selectively, and in high yield, and it has become one of the most widely used reactions in chemistry, biology, and materials science. Earlier in his career Meldal was a leading developer of solid-phase peptide synthesis methodology and instrumentation, devising multiple-column synthesizers and split-and-mix combinatorial library techniques, and he demonstrated that the triazole-forming reaction is orthogonal to nearly all functional-group chemistry, making it ideal for bioconjugation, polymer modification, and on-bead screening. He pioneered optical encoding of bead libraries and methods for generating and screening N-acyl iminium-ion libraries against G-protein-coupled receptors. Meldal earned his degrees at the Technical University of Denmark, led the synthesis group at the Carlsberg Laboratory, and in 2019 co-founded Betamab Therapeutics to develop peptide-based antibody mimics, illustrating the translational reach of his combinatorial-chemistry toolkit.