STOCKHOLM, October 4. /TASS/. The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will name the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday.

The names of laureates are kept secret until the moment of announcement.

According to Clarivate’s annual list of citation laureates, the award may go to US bioengineer James Collins, US, biologist Michael Elowitz, and theoretical and experimental biologist and physicist Stanislas Leibler for their "pioneering work" on synthetic gene circuits, which "established the field of synthetic biology."

Other possible nominees are medicinal chemist Shankar Balasubramanian and biophysical chemist David Klenerman for their co-invention of next-generation DNA sequencing that has "revolutionized" biological research.

The prize may also go to head of the Innovation Center of NanoMedicine Kazunori Kataoka (the University of Tokyo in Japan), head of the biochemistry and pharmacology center of the Northeastern University in the US Vladimir Torchilin and a polymer chemist from Texas A&M University Karen Wooley for developing innovative methods of drug and gene targeting and delivery.

Swedish experts also believe that the prize may go to scientists working for major environmental projects or in the climate research area, such as pioneer of the so-called green chemistry, Paul Anastas.

Last year’s winners

The 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a group of scientists, US nationals Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless and Denmark’s Morten Meldal, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry." According to a statement from the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the researchers "have laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry - click chemistry - in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently."

It was the second Nobel Prize for Sharpless. He has already won it in 2001 for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions important in developing pharmaceutical products with another half of the prize going to US national William Knowles and Japan’s Ryoji Noyori for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions.

Around 2000, Sharpless coined the concept of click chemistry, which is a form of simple and reliable chemistry, where reactions occur quickly and unwanted by-products are avoided.