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Berkeley chemist wins national award for sugar research

Chemist Carolyn Bertozzi of Berkeley, Calif., will be honored April 3 by the world's largest scientific society for her efforts to use sugars attached to living cell surfaces to understand and treat disease. She will receive the 2001 Award in Pure Chemistry from the American Chemical Society at its 221st national meeting this week in San Diego.

"In order for cells to work together as tissues and organs, they have to communicate with each other," explains Bertozzi, an organic chemist at the University of California at Berkeley. "Some of that communication is mediated by sugar molecules attached to the surfaces of cells. We study how the structures of these sugar molecules direct the interactions of cells within tissues."

Cancer cells, for example, tend to display unusual sugars on their surfaces. Bertozzi's work supports the hypothesis that such molecules actually protect tumors from destruction by the immune system - which could be a reason why some cancers are more difficult to treat than others, she said.

Her research has helped develop techniques to use these "signature sugars" as beacons for diagnostic tools or chemotherapy agents for cancer. The approach involves feeding cells synthetic sugars, which cancer cells preferentially metabolize and display. If the unnatural sugars have unusual chemical properties, the cancer cells might then stand out from the normal ones around them.

"This gives us a chemical handle that we can target with diagnostic agents, such as probes for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)," she explained. "The hope is to eventually be able to diagnose cancers at an earlier stage."

Bertozzi also investigates the role of sugars in rheumatoid arthritis, organ transplant rejection, and other forms of chronic inflammation. "Tissue damage is caused by inflammation that has gone out of control," she said. "If we can understand the molecules involved in that process, we may be able to calm it down."

Bertozzi received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1988 and her Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. She is a member of the ACS carbohydrate division, heads the department of chemical biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, and is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The ACS Award in Pure Chemistry is sponsored by Alpha Chi Sigma Fraternity.

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