Martina Delbianco Wins the Prestigious Feltrinelli Prize for Groundbreaking Research on Carbohydrate Materials
She receives €50,000 in recognition of her pioneering work on the automated synthesis of complex carbohydrates—long overlooked in research, yet holding great promise for the development of tailored bio-inspired materials and innovative therapeutic approaches.
The Feltrinelli Award is one of Italy’s most prestigious scientific honors, granted annually by the country’s oldest academy of sciences, the Accademia dei Lincei. This year, the prize for young Italian researchers in chemistry (€50,000) was awarded to Dr. Martina Delbianco for her pioneering work on carbohydrate-based materials.
Carbohydrates are the most abundant polymers in nature—and also the most structurally complex. Their intricate branching makes them notoriously difficult to synthesize and, therefore, to study in detail. Delbianco tackles this challenge by precisely synthesizing carbohydrates using automated methods. With her team, she engineers synthetic sugar chains that adopt well-defined three-dimensional shapes, from helices to sheets.
“A carbohydrate’s chemical structure determines how it folds and self-assembles,” explains Delbianco. “If we can understand how this works, the potential applications range from bioinspired materials to new therapeutic strategies.”
Carbohydrates, for example, are found on the surfaces of all cells—human and microbial —and play vital roles in immune response. Their synthetic counterparts could be tailored for specific material properties and be used as mimics of biological matrices, nanostructured coatings, or even as catalysts for organic transformations.
Delbianco led the first-ever study that produced a glycan with a programmable conformation, disentangling its precise structure and folding behavior. It is fitting that this and her other groundbreaking achievements are being recognized by the Accademia dei Lincei—whose emblem, the lynx, symbolizes the sharp vision of invisible details required to make great discoveries. True to that symbol, Delbianco brings carbohydrate nanostructure into sharp focus, opening new frontiers in science.
