Yimon Aye, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, has received the Klaus Grohe Prize 2024 from the Klaus Grohe Foundation, which is part of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). The prize is awarded to internationally renowned researchers in the field of drug development whose work makes an important contribution to applications. The prize is endowed with EUR 50,000. The award was presented at the EMFC International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC-ISMC 2024) in Rome, Italy, on September 1, 2024.
Aye has received the award for her groundbreaking research into cell communication and enzyme manipulation, with which she has advanced both basic research and practical applications in medicine. She has expanded the understanding of cellular processes and opened up new paths for the development of more effective and targeted drugs. For example, she developed T-REX (Targetable Reactive Electrophiles and Oxidants), an innovative method for the targeted modification of proteins. T-REX can be used to observe specific chemical changes in proteins and study their effects on living cells. She has also studied, for example, how certain multiple sclerosis drugs work and has developed a new drug that specifically inhibits a protein target that is interesting for cancer research.
Yimon Aye was born in 1980 in Yangon, Myanmar. She studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. After completing her Ph.D. at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, under the supervision of David A. Evans, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, in 2009. Starting in 2012, Aye worked at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, and in 2018, she moved to the EPFL, Switzerland. There, she leads the Laboratory of Electrophiles And Genome Operation (LEAGO) as an Associate Professor.
Among many other awards and honors, Aye received the Pershing Square Sohn Young Investigator in Cancer Research Prize in 2017, the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Award for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia in 2020, an American Chemical Society (ACS) Cope Scholars Award in 2021, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry in 2022, and a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant Award in 2022. In addition to other commitments on advisory boards and committees, she has served as an Associate Editor of ACS Chemical Biology since 2022.
Selected Publications
- Climbing into their Skin to Understand Contextual Protein–Protein Associations and Localizations: Functional Investigations in Transgenic Live Model Organisms,
Marcus J. C. Long, Yimon Aye,
ChemBioChem 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1002/cbic.202400005 - Formaldehyde regulates one-carbon metabolism and epigenetics,
Marcus J.C. Long, Yimon Aye,
Trends Genet. 2024, 40, 381–382.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2024.03.002 - Horner–Wadsworth–Emmons olefination for bioconjugation,
Yimon Aye,
Nat. Synth. 2024, 3, 935–936.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44160-024-00571-z - Redox Signaling by Reactive Electrophiles and Oxidants,
Saba Parvez, Marcus J. C. Long, Jesse R. Poganik, Yimon Aye,
Chem. Rev. 2018, 118, 8798–8888.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.7b00698 - Ube2V2 Is a Rosetta Stone Bridging Redox and Ubiquitin Codes, Coordinating DNA Damage Responses,
Yi Zhao, Marcus J. C. Long, Yiran Wang, Sheng Zhang, Yimon Aye,
ACS Cent. Sci. 2018, 4, 246–259.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.7b00556 - Vinyl‐, Propargyl‐, and Allenylsilicon Reagents in Asymmetric Synthesis: A Relatively Untapped Resource of Environmentally Benign Reagents,
Marcus J. Curtis‐Long, Yimon Aye,
Chem. Eur. J. 2009, 15, 5402–5416.
https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.200900337
