Chad Mirkin, 2024 Kavli Prize Laureate in Nanoscience

The 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience honors Robert Langer, Paul Alivisatos and Chad Mirkin who each revolutionized the field of nanomedicine by demonstrating how engineering nanoscale materials can advance biomedical research and application.
Chad Mirkin engineered spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) using a gold nanoparticle as the core, and a cloud of radially distributed DNA or RNA strands as the shell. He was then able to show how SNAs can be combined to create larger structures and how they can be used in biodiagnostics. His discovery led to the development of fast, automated point-of-care medical diagnostic systems.