Ruzicka Prize 2025 for Nako Nakatsuka
Where antibodies reach their limits in medicine, aptamers step in.?For her pioneering work in developing aptamer-modified biosensors, Nako Nakatsuka, assistant professor at EPFL, has been honored with the 2025 Ruzicka Prize.
How much do we really know about our brain and the communication that takes place there? According to Nako Nakatsuka, we still don't know enough.
Although significant progress has already been made in monitoring electrical brain activity, there is still an urgent need for biosensors that can measure neurotransmitters in real time, with high specificity and molecular selectivity. This is precisely what Nako Nakatsuka's research focuses on.
Together with her group, Nakatsuka focuses on aptamer-modified nanopore biosensors. Aptamers, short, single-stranded DNA sequences, offer many advantages: unlike antibodies, they can be rapidly synthesized and tailored in the laboratory, enabling them to bind even the smallest target molecules with precision.
However, a deeper understaning of how aptamers interact with their targets was missing for a long time. Nakatsuka spent a decade characterizing the binding of aptamers to the target molecules. Together with her team, she developed a biosensor that can detect dopamine in picomolar concentrations – a breakthrough because detecting neurotransmitters in serum is extremely difficult due to their low concentration in a complex.
The sensor is currently being improved in anticipation of quantifying dopamine using samples from Parkinson's disease patients. ‘Parkinson's disease leads to a decrease of dopamine in the brain, which causes symptoms such as the tremor,’ remarks Nakatsuka. ‘Our biosensor is not a cure for Parkinson’s disease, but if we can use it to test whether blood dopamine is a good proxy for brain dopamine, we could eventually develop a monitoring system for Parkinson's patients, empowering them to track their dopamine levels and fine-tune their medication in real time. Better patient care through personalized medicine. That is our goal.’
Learn more about Nako Nakatsuka and her research reading our Ruzicka Prize Portrait!
Nako Nakatsuka, originally from Japan, studied Chemistry at Fordham University, New York, and pursued her Ph.D. at UCLA. As an ETH fellow she moved to ETH Zürich and, after her postdoc, remained as a senior scientist at the Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Now, Nako Nakatsuka is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Neuro-X Institute at EPFL. For her work, she was named MIT Under 35 Pioneer in 2021 and received several awards. She was an active member of the ETH Diversity Team. external page To the Nakatsuka Group.
The Ruzicka Prize, named after the ETH professor and Nobel laureate Leopold Ruzicka and supported by dsm-firmenich, is one of the most important awards for the promotion of young scientists in the field of chemistry in Switzerland. The prize is endowed with 10,000 CHF.
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