The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker of the University of Washington (USA), “for the computational design of proteins”, and to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind in London (United Kingdom) “for the prediction of protein structure”.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry focuses on proteins, the ingenious chemical tools of life. David Baker has achieved the “almost impossible” feat of building completely new types of proteins.
For their part, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an Artificial Intelligence model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins. These discoveries have enormous potential.
“One of the discoveries being awarded this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other concerns the realization of a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both discoveries open up enormous possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins are made up of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as the building blocks of life. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these building blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other. Since then, his research group has produced one protein after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structure. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long chains that fold into a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function.
Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, a surprising breakthrough came.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper introduced an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since its breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.
Among a host of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can break down plastic.
“Life could not exist without proteins. The fact that we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins is a great benefit to humanity,” says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
David Baker was born in 1962 in Seattle (USA). He received his PhD in 1989 from the University of California (Berkeley, CA, USA) and is a professor at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA).
Demis Hassabis was born in 1976 in London (UK). He received his PhD in 2009 from University College London (UK) and is CEO of Google DeepMind in London.
John M. Jumper, born in 1985 in Little Rock (Arkansas, USA), received his PhD in 2017 from the University of Chicago (Illinois, USA) and is a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind in London.
