Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to 3 scientists for work on proteins

Credit: Reuters

Caption: Announcers of the laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Johan Aqvist, Hans Ellegren and Heiner Linke, look on as the images of the winners, David Baker (University of Washington, USA), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind, UK) and John M Jumper (Google DeepMind, UK) are displayed, in Stockholm, Sweden October 9, 2024.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to David Baker for computational protein design, and to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for protein structure prediction, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.

Baker is based at the University of Washington in Seattle, while the other two laureates conduct their research at Google DeepMind in London.

"One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Baker's work in 2003 led to the design of a new protein by using amino acids, the building blocks of life. His team's innovative protein creations have since been applied in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and sensors.

"He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind," Linke said.

The second recognized discovery, an AI model called AlphaFold2, was presented by Hassabis and Jumper in 2020. AlphaFold2 enables the prediction of the structure of nearly 200 million identified proteins, advancing research in areas such as antibiotic resistance.