The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to researchers who developed metal-organic frameworks, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today (Oct 8). Chemists Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University, Richard Robson from Melbourne University, and Omar Yaghi from the University of California, Berkeley, shared the prize.
“Imagine that the tools of chemistry could be used to create entirely new materials with unheard of properties,” said Heiner Linke, a solid state physicist at Lund University and Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “This year’s laureates have done just that.”
Kitagawa, Robson, and Yaghi synthesized nanometer-sized materials with metal ions and organic linkers to form crystals containing large cavities. Scientists can build such metal-organic frameworks using various building blocks to capture specific substances and impart the materials distinct properties, which can be leveraged in several fields including nanomedicine.1
“Metal-organic frameworks are revolutionary porous crystalline materials with tunable structures and high surface areas,” Michael Dennis, chief science officer at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, said in an email. “[Their] extraordinary versatility makes these materials one of the most universally applicable platforms for addressing global challenges in virtually every sector, including environmental remediation, renewable energy, industrial catalysis, medical diagnostics, drug delivery, electronics, and sensing technologies.”
Synthesizing the First Metal-Organic Frameworks
The roots of this work trace back to 1989, when Robson experimented with combining positively-charged copper ions and a compound with tetrahedral geometry. Based on prior knowledge, he hypothesized that such an assembly would create three-dimensional structures with cavities.2 Although he successfully constructed a well-ordered, spacious crystal, it was unstable.
Building upon this, Kitagawa and Yaghi separately described such structures using different building blocks that were more stable.3 Kitagawa discovered that the cavities within the frameworks allowed gases to flow in and out, while Yaghi showed that these structures could be modified to give them new and desirable properties.4
Following the foundation laid by Robson, Kitagawa, and Yaghi, chemists have synthesized thousands of metal-organic frameworks with distinct properties by tweaking the molecules and preparation methods. “These became famous in the early days for things like hydrogen storage, carbon dioxide storage,” said Leighton Jones, a materials chemist and an information scientist at CAS. “Then, of course people realized, ‘Oh, they’re metals, so we can do catalysis too.’”
Metal-Organic Frameworks in Biomedicine
Over time, scientists have leveraged metal organic-frameworks in a variety of fields to solve some of humankind’s greatest challenges: These recyclable materials can be used to separate forever chemicals from water, harvest water from dry air, and purify air, among other things.
Metal-organic frameworks have also shown potential in the field of medicine and physiology. Owing to their biocompatible building blocks, scientists have used the materials as probes for biosensors to detect DNA, RNA, enzyme activity, and small biomolecules, and in bioimaging strategies.5,6
“A lot of the applications that people have started to realize [are] that these metal-organic frameworks can also be quite inert to the body physiology,” said Jones. “So, you can have them as drug delivery scaffolds, which is pretty amazing.”
Given the immense potential of these structures, Jones was not surprised that the chemists who pioneered them won the Nobel Prize. “Metal-organic frameworks have been around for a while,” he said. “These winners…have been very hot contenders for the Nobel Prize for several years.”
Jones added that this award will shine a public light on metal-organic frameworks, which could help various stakeholders utilize these materials to their full potential. “This is a really good opportunity to explore this field further.”
