The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with “one half” to David Baker
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, London, UK and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, London, UK “for protein structure prediction”.
They cracked the code for proteins’ amazing structures, stated the Academy in a press release issued on October 9. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential, stated the Academy.
“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,” said Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
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.
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“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,” mentioned the Academy.
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.
“Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind,” stated the Academy.
