Benjamin F. Cravatt III – Chemical Proteomics Trailblazer

The advances in large‐scale bioanalytical methods and computational approaches have afforded tremendous insight into fundamental mechanisms of health and disease as well as provided new opportunities for therapeutic development. However, the majority of proteins in humans remain undrugged or lack chemical probes to explore their functions in vivo. The pioneering studies on activity‐based protein profiling (ABPP) by Ben Cravatt and his lab members have provided a systematic and generalizable approach to address this major challenge in chemical biology and drug discovery. Notably, the Cravatt laboratory paved the way for employing activity‐ and reactivity‐based chemical probes with quantitative proteomics to identify small molecule protein targets and discover unpredicted protein hot spots for native and synthetic ligands. Importantly, these chemical proteomic methods have revealed new protein targets and mechanisms of action for drug discovery and have been widely adopted by many other laboratories around the world to discover new biology and pharmacology. The recognition of Ben Cravatt as a co‐recipient of the 2022 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for this trailblazing work in chemical proteomics is most well‐deserved.