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The Kavli Prize Presents: Building Materials From The Bottom Up [Sponsored]
Chad Mirkin, recipient of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, has spent his career exploring the possibilities of creating and inventing materials at the nanoscale.
This podcast was produced for The Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
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July 16, 2024
7 min read
The Kavli Prize Presents: Building Materials From The Bottom Up
Chad Mirkin, recipient of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, has spent his career exploring the possibilities of creating and inventing materials at the nanoscale
Scientific American Custom Media
[SNA molecule descending]
The International Institute of Nanotechnology, Northwestern University
[Scientific American Custom Media Logo]
This podcast was produced for The Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
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Megan Hall: What if you could create any material you wanted or even invent new materials by building them one particle at a time? Chad Mirkin has spent his career not only making this possible, but also exploring ways these tiny creations can transform research, healthcare and technology.
This year, he received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Robert Langer and Paul Alivisatos for building materials from the bottom up.
Scientific American Custom Media, in partnership with The Kavli Prize, spoke with Chad to learn about his journey as a scientist and the future of this work.
Megan Hall: Chad Mirkin likes to say he became a chemist by default.
Chad Mirkin: You go to college. You’re young. You don’t really know what you want to do. Your mother says go out and be a rich doctor, become a rich lawyer, or become a businessman. Nobody says go out and be a scientist, right? At least they didn’t in my family. And so I went to school thinking, oh, I’m going to be a doctor.
Megan Hall: He was well on his way toward using his chemistry degree to prepare for medical school when he sat in on a surgery.
Chad Mirkin: And I thought it was the most boring, most repulsive thing I’d ever seen. And I had a crisis. I said, I can’t do this. There is no way I can do this for the rest of my life.
Megan Hall: Chad Mirkin quickly pivoted to a career in research and never looked back. He studied chemistry at Dickinson College and went on to receive a PhD from Penn State. He then did a postdoc at MIT, where he worked with Mark Wrighton, a chemist who was studying the consequences of miniaturization.
Chad Mirkin: He was thinking about what happens when you take chemical systems and utilize them to make electronic devices. And what happens when you shrink them down, not to the nanoscale, but to the microscale?
Megan Hall: Nanoscience was just in its infancy at the time, but once Chad made his way to Northwestern University as a young professor, it was starting to bloom. And Chad was hooked.
Chad Mirkin: It’s a brand new sandbox. It’s fantastic. I tell people I haven’t worked a day in my life. I get to come to work and have fun.
Megan Hall: Chad says there are two major principles when it comes to nanoscience. One, everything acts differently when you shrink it down to the miniature level.
Chad Mirkin: Gold’s a great example of that. You shrink gold down. It’s no longer the gold that you associate with a wedding band. It can be red in color. It can be blue. It could be green, depending upon the size and the shape of the particles that you end up with.
Megan Hall: And two, once you know about those differences, you can figure out what to do with them.
So if I were to summarize what you do, would it be accurate to say you shrink things down to see what happens when they get smaller, and then you figure out cool things to do with them?
Chad Mirkin: That’s absolutely right. And I would add one caveat. We also try to figure out why… why does shrinking them down lead to these types of properties?
Megan Hall: Chad Mirkin has spent more than 30 years at Northwestern doing this kind of work. He received The Kavli Prize for an innovation that’s built by attaching little snippets of DNA or RNA to the surface of a tiny sphere called a nanoparticle.
Chad Mirkin: It’s a Koosh-ball-like structure. Think of the little hairs sticking out of a Koosh ball as being the DNA strands.
Megan Hall: When Chad’s team first built these spherical nucleic acids, they started by making nanoparticles coated with single strands of DNA that didn’t recognize each other. They then added another complementary snippet of DNA that formed the bridge, or the glue, to connect those particles together.
Chad Mirkin: And now they’re like chemically-specific Velcro. You throw them into a solution. If they’ve been designed to react with one another, they will, and they will assemble into these beautiful lattices.
Megan Hall: The new nanostructures also did something unexpected.
Chad Mirkin: I was in my office. A young grad student, Bobby Mucic, came running down, and he said, "Chad, you got to see this!"
Megan Hall: When Mucic mixed the two types of nanoparticles, the solution transformed.
Chad Mirkin: The color of the solution went from really intense ruby red to intense blue.
Megan Hall: His grad student heated the solution, breaking the bonds between the strands of DNA, and the solution turned red again. Then he cooled it down, letting the bonds form again, and the solution turned blue.
Chad Mirkin: And what he was watching at that time was the formation of the double helix and the disassembly of the double helix, with the naked eye. And almost in unison, we said, this is a new detection system for DNA.
Megan Hall: Chad and his grad student had realized that they could design spherical nucleic acids that only velcro together in the presence of a particular form of DNA.
Chad Mirkin: And so what that means is I can create particles that are designed to recognize anything living, any living organism, any person, any genetic disease, any bacterial disease, any viral disease. I can create particles that are complementary to it.
Megan Hall: And if the particles are complementary to a form of DNA from a specific disease, for instance, they’ll bond together and change the color of the solution. Chad quickly started a company to leverage this discovery and develop the technology for new diagnostic tools.
Chad Mirkin: That technology is still out there, and it’s used in a large number of the hospitals in the world.
Megan Hall: But spherical nucleic acids aren’t just useful diagnostic tools. Chad says arranging DNA and RNA on nanoparticles gives them exciting new capabilities. For instance, DNA on its own can’t enter cells, but DNA as a spherical nucleic acid can.
Chad Mirkin: Now, we could get large amounts of DNA and RNA into cells, and we can begin to use that to manipulate what goes on in cells.
Megan Hall: Moving DNA and RNA around this way can help address all kinds of medical issues, from cancer...
Chad Mirkin: For example, you have got cancer cells that are producing too much of a protein that’s causing a problem. We can go create spherical nucleic acids that go in and dock the production of those proteins down so that we bring it back into a normal state.
Megan Hall: …to psoriasis.
Chad Mirkin: If they are producing too much of an inflammatory protein, we can create constructs that go in and dial down the production of that and move them from the unhealthy psoriatic state back to a more healthy skin state.
Megan Hall: On top of that, Chad says spherical nucleic acids are helping to transform another key area of healthcare.
Chad Mirkin: We believe this is going to completely revolutionize how vaccines are developed.
Megan Hall: Chad says all vaccines contain two key components – an adjuvant to stimulate the immune system and an antigen to train the immune system to attack an infection or a disease.
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