2025 Chemistry Nobel Goes to Molecular Sponges That Purify Water, Store Energy and Clean Up the Environment

2025 Chemistry Nobel Goes to Molecular Sponges That Purify Water, Store Energy and Clean Up the Environment

By Megha Satyanarayana edited by Josh Fischman

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for a versatile technology that can be used for an astonishing variety of purposes, from environmental remediation to drug delivery and energy storage.

Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, are molecular sponges that are already in clinical trials for use in cancer radiation treatment and are being sold as a way to contain carbon dioxide taken from cement and to fuel hydrogen production. They are also being explored as methods of pulling water out of air in arid places, cleaning up wastewater, and removing perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the environment and for providing targeted drug delivery. The researchers behind MOFs—Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi—will share the Nobel Prize and divide the award of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about $1 million.

During a press briefing, Yaghi—a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been widely credited for expanding the use of MOFs—referenced other ways the frameworks could be used, including the sequestration of nerve gas. MOFs “opened new avenues of applications that other materials could not do,” he said.

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MOFs are part chemistry, part materials science. They are made by linking metal ions with organic, or carbon-containing, molecules. The linked molecules form crystals with the metal-organic compound, repeating to create a cage with a hole—or a pore in a sponge—where the smaller molecules come together. The cages can be one-dimensional or multidimensional, and they can be formed from a host of metals and organic linkers to make structures with larger or smaller pores. The holes are generally uniform in size.

Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne dreamed up the first MOFs. He was inspired by the tetrahedral, or pyramidlike, shape that carbon atoms take to form diamonds. He mixed a form of copper with a nitrile, an organic compound with nitrogen bonded to carbon, and watched as it formed that repeating structure with small spaces in it. But early MOFs were not very stable.

The pores are key to the power of MOFs, says Ling Zang, a material scientist at the University of Utah, who is using these frameworks to sequester PFAS from water. The porous of nature of MOFs means relatively small amounts can adsorb huge quantities of its intended target. They can be small, less than a nanometer, he says, but also several nanometers in size. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry noted the surprisingly large capacity of MOFs, with one member comparing it to the character Hermione Granger’s beaded bag, which could hold much more than its size would suggest, in the Harry Potter series.

The size of the pore is important for removing PFAS because some chemicals in this group have only two carbons in their chains, and others have eight or 10. Zang is building a MOF that fluoresces when it’s full, telling the user when it should be changed out like an indicator light on a home water filter.

Kitagawa, a researcher at Kyoto University, furthered MOF developments with the scientists in his laboratory, creating structures that were flexible and finding that gases could flow in and out of MOFs. Yaghi and his collaborators helped make MOFs more stable, tinkering with many combinations of metal ions and organic linkers.

Wenbin Lin of the University of Chicago is the scientist whose team created RiMO-301, a MOF with medical applications that is now in clinical trials as a way to make radiation treatment for some cancers more effective. RiMO-301 is injected into tumors before low-dose radiation therapy. Lin says that in interim results of his team’s phase 1 trial, 42 percent of people who otherwise would not have responded to radiation therapy responded to RiMO-301.

Like many in the field, Theresa Reineke knew the time was coming for MOFs to earn this high honor in science. She was one of Yaghi’s first graduate students and works on organic drug delivery systems at the University of Minnesota. There was a lot of doubt in the early days of MOFs, she says. Yaghi and other scientists had to prove that this new material could do the job better, more efficiently and more cost-effectively than what was already out there.

In many ways, they have done so, says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede of Rice University, a protein chemist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and one of the members of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

“Sometimes it depends on the competition that particular year,” she says. But with MOFs, “it’s really that all these applications were building up.” The technology, and often Yaghi, have been on Nobel prediction lists for years. “It was ready,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “It became the right time.”

Editor’s Note (10/8/25): This story has been updated.

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