The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prizes were announced in early October. This year, Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.” These particles are widely used in commercial applications, such as computer displays and medical imaging technologies. Particularly exciting this year were the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who shared the prize for “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” Their research fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the human immune system. Although their results were initially published in 2005, Karikó and Weissman nonetheless paved the way for later development and scale-up of mRNA-based vaccines during the pandemic.
The work of these accomplished researchers has revolutionized the fields of quantum mechanics, synthetic biology, and translational medicine. The special section in this issue of CEP — The Future of Bioengineering — examines three more major developments that could likewise have a lasting impact on science and society.
This special section is also a tribute to the influence of AIChE’s Society for Biological Engineering (SBE, aiche.org/sbe). SBE’s conferences showcase some of the latest findings in emerging fields of bioengineering, including CRISPR technologies, biopharmaceutical development, and cell-free systems, among many others. SBE holds more than a dozen conferences each year to engage with academic researchers and industrial practitioners alike.
CEP editors regularly attend the SBE conferences to keep up with the latest bioengineering developments and to source some of the content that we print throughout the year. This year, for example, I attended SBE’s largest annual event, the Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) conference. The conference, held in early June, brought together more than 500 researchers and practitioners, with technical programming topics ranging from big data to engineered biomedicines.
At SEED, I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture given by Albert Keung, an Associate Professor and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State Univ. Keung presented his vision of a DNA data storage system and discussed his start-up company, DNAli Data Technologies, which is working to address some of the challenges of DNA-based biocomputers. The talk was so inspiring that the CEP editors invited him to contribute a manuscript based on his presentation, which you can now read on pp. 34–37. Soon after his lecture at SEED, Keung would be announced as the winner of AIChE’s 2023 Langer Prize, which provides an unrestricted grant of up to $100,000 to early-career entrepreneurs.
If you will not be able to attend the Langer Prize lecture on Nov. 6 at AIChE’s Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL, I encourage you to read Keung’s feature article in this issue, which gives an introduction to his work. And, if you are interested in meeting some of the researchers and scientists who will make lasting impacts on the future of bioengineering, I recommend that you attend an SBE conference. Who knows? The next Nobel Prize winner may just be in attendance.
Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief
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