Ways to speed up and control the evolution of proteins to produce greener technologies and new medicines have won three scientists the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Chemical engineer Frances Arnold, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is just the second woman to win the prize, , in the past 50 years. She was awarded half of the 9 million Swedish kroner(US$1 million) pot. The remaining half was shared between Gregory Winter at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and George Smith at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

Arnold carried out pioneering work in the 1990s on ‘directed evolution’ of enzymes. She devised a method for inducing mutations in enzyme-producing bacteria and then screening and selecting the bacteria to speed up and direct enzyme evolution. These enzymes, proteins that catalyse chemical reactions, are now used in applications from making biofuels to synthesizing medical drugs.

In 1985, Smith pioneered a method known as phage display. The technique uses a bacteriophage — a virus that infects bacteria — as a host that displays a protein on its outer coat, allowing researchers to find other molecules that interact with the protein. Winter developed and improved this technology, and invented ways to use it to evolve antibodies adapted for use as human therapeutics. Today, antibodies evolved using this method can neutralize toxins and counteract autoimmune diseases.

The first humanized antibody, called adalimumab, was discovered by Cambridge Antibody Technology — a company that Winter co-founded in 1989 — and was approved for treating rheumatoid arthritis in 2002. It is also used to treat psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases, and has generated billions of dollars in sales.

“This year’s prize in chemistry rewards a revolution based on evolution,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry 2018, during the prize announcement on 3 October. “Our laureates have applied principles of Darwin in the test tubes, and used this approach to develop new types of chemicals for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Winter previously told Nature Biotechnology that he was lucky because the Laboratory of Molecular Biology had given him “carte blanche” to get on with his work without distinguishing between pure and applied science. “It would have been very difficult to have made my inventions on classic grant funding (it would have been seen as too applied) or on industry money (it would have been seen as too early, and anyway most companies weren't interested in antibodies at the beginning),” he said.

Before Arnold, the last woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was Ada Yonath , a crystallographer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who won in 2009 for mapping the structure of the ribosome, which generates proteins from the genetic code in cells. Before her, the most recent woman to win was crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, in 1964. Arnold is just the fifth female winner in the prize’s history. In 2016, she won the Millennium Technology Prize for her research.