Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for uncovering the secrets of proteins with AI and computing Science

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry this Wednesday, with half going to David Baker for “Design of proteins with computation” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for “Protein structure Given for “prediction of”. Through the use of artificial intelligence.” The committee that presented the award highlighted the potential applications of its scientific achievements in the many processes in which they are involved, from the rapid development of vaccines to the discovery of new nanomaterials, to cancer treatment. To summarize the great benefits to humanity of Becker, Hassabis and Jumper’s progress toward the design or development of targeted medicines, Heiner Linke said: To understand how proteins work, you first need to know what they look like.”

The British Demis Hassabis (London, 1976) and the American John Jumper (Little Rock, 1985) have successfully used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins since the Google DeepMind company, of which Hassabis is CEO. With their artificial intelligence model AlphaFold2, presented in 2020, they have managed to predict the three-dimensional structure of almost all proteins identified so far – about 200 million – based solely on the amino acid sequence that makes up their chain. Is. These very long chains fold into highly complex shapes, which determine the biological activity of proteins, and predicting these structures was a pending challenge for science since the 1970s.

David Baker has learned to master the building blocks of life and create entirely new proteins.

The prize is worth 11 million Swedish crowns, approximately 950,000 euros. After the medicine and physics awards announced on Monday and Tuesday, the round of announcements regarding the chemistry award continues, which will conclude with the literature award on Thursday and the peace award on Friday. In 2023, the winners were Frenchman Mongi Bawendi, American Lewis E. Bruce and Russian Alexey Ekimov for the discovery of quantum dots.

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 116 times and revoked eight times – the last time in 1942. Since the award can be shared between three laureates each year, a total of 195 people have received it. Only eight of them have been women: the first was Marie Curie, in 1911; and the last, Caroline Bertozzi, in 2022. And only two scientists have repeated this award: Frederick Sanger (in 1958 and 1980) and Barry Sharpless (in 2001 and 2022).

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