TheNobel Prize in Chemistry 2009has fallen on three researchers dedicated to studying thefunctioning of ribosomesand its possible uses to create future therapies: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (England); Thomas A. Steitz, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA); and Ada E. Yonath, from the Weizmann Scientific Institute (Israel). “Ribosomes – a component of the cells of all living things – are crucial for life and therefore are also a prime target for newantibiotics“, explained the Committee of the Nobel Foundation.
Half of the antibiotics used in medicine today target ribosomes. In recent years, Dr. Yonath has helped decipher the keys to the ribosome machinery and understand how theybacteriathey can becomeantibiotic resistant. For their part, Steitz and his colleagues at Yale have createdRib-X Pharmaceuticals, a company trying to create new hybrid antibiotics that possess “the ability to bind to interact simultaneously with different and nearby sites on the ribosome.” Attacking several points at the same time, they predict, will increase the effectiveness in thefight bacteria.
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