The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker for computational protein design, and jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for protein structure prediction.
Their groundbreaking work on proteins, life’s essential chemical tools, includes Baker’s creation of new proteins and Hassabis and Jumper’s development of an AI model to predict protein structures, solving a long-standing challenge with vast potential.
The incredible diversity of life showcases proteins’ remarkable ability as chemical tools, driving and controlling all essential biological reactions. They also serve as hormones, signals, antibodies, and tissue building blocks. Typically made of 20 amino acids, proteins are life’s fundamental components.
In 2003, David Baker achieved a breakthrough by designing a completely new protein, and his research group has since developed innovative proteins with applications in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and sensors.The second breakthrough focuses on predicting protein structures.
Proteins are long chains of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional shapes, crucial for their function.
Predicting these structures from amino acid sequences has been a major challenge since the 1970s.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper introduced the AI model AlphaFold2, which can predict the structure of nearly all 200 million known proteins.
Used by over two million people worldwide, AlphaFold2 has advanced research in areas like antibiotic resistance and plastic-decomposing enzymes.
Reference: Noble Prize website
