2023 Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture: Carolyn Bertozzi

The 2023 Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture was presented on Tuesday, October 17, by Nobel laureate Carolyn R. Bertozzi.
Bertozzi received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her role in founding the field of bioorthogonal chemistry, a term she coined, and for “taking click chemistry to a new level” with a set of chemical reactions that allow scientists to explore cells and track biological processes without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell.
Complex sugars known as glycans cover the surfaces of all living cells where they serve as a molecular “barcode” that reports on the health status of the cell. Cancer cells are known to undergo changes in the structures and abundances of certain glycans, most prominently those that include a sugar building block called sialic acid. Consequently, cancer cells have more sialic acids on their surface than healthy, normal cells.
Bertozzi's lecture, "Sweet Revenge on Cancer" explains how she and her team discovered that this thicket of sialic acids allows cancer cells to escape recognition by our immune system, which allows the cancer to grow and spread. This finding motivated them to develop a new kind of cancer immunotherapy that functions as a “lawnmower,” cutting the disease sugars off cancer cells so that the immune system can recognize and kill them.
To learn more about the Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture, please visit ow.ly/uoCV50Q1caQ