Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the award-giving body said on Wednesday.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with one half to David Baker University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis Google DeepMind, London, UK John M. Jumper Google DeepMind, London, UK “for protein structure prediction.”
The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function. Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
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