John Fenn, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a technique that sped up the development of new drugs and the study of the molecules of life, died Friday in Richmond, Va. He was 93.

A spokeswoman for Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where Fenn was a professor of chemistry, confirmed Fenn’s death but did not provide information about its cause or his survivors.

Fenn was in his 70s when he published the research that won the Nobel Prize, focusing on a new way to identify and map proteins, carbohydrates, DNA and other large biological molecules. He shared the prize with Koichi Tanaka, an engineer in Kyoto, Japan, and Kurt Wuethrich, a professor of biophysics in Zurich, who worked independently on related protein research.

Fenn improved a technique known as mass spectrometry, which identifies molecules like proteins by how quickly they are accelerated in an electric field. Using his approach, biologists can now identify molecules in a matter of seconds rather than weeks, speeding up research on new drugs.

The techniques have helped create a new field of biology, proteomics, in which scientists are trying to catalog the interplay of hundreds of thousands of proteins in human cells.

“The possibility of analyzing proteins in detail has led to increased understanding of the processes of life,” the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences said in its citation for the 2002 prize.