On the 9th, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to David Baker in recognition of his contributions to computational protein design, while the other half will be jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their contributions to protein structure prediction.

The Nobel Prize website stated that this year's three Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have deciphered the astonishing structures of proteins. The theme of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is Proteins - exquisite chemical tools in life. Baker, the Chemistry laureate, successfully completed a nearly impossible task by constructing entirely new proteins.

The other two joint winners, Hassabis and Jumper, developed the AI model AlphaFold2 to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins.

Hassabis and Jumper work at Google DeepMind. Yesterday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the 'AI father', highlighting once again the Nobel Prize's favor towards artificial intelligence.

David Baker: Computational protein design opens a new chapter for human health.

Baker, born in Seattle, obtained his Bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He currently serves as the Director of the Protein Design Institute at the University of Washington.

He won the 2020 Scientific Breakthrough Award in Life Sciences for developing a technology to design novel proteins that have never appeared in nature, and for the first time used generative ai to design brand new antibodies, potentially allowing ai to design proteins from scratch to enter the antibody drug market.

He is also considered a pioneer in the field of protein design, proposing methods for predicting and designing the three-dimensional structure of proteins earlier than DeepMind, and even designing a protein structure design algorithm called RoseTTAFold earlier than AlphaFold.

His research group has created imaginative proteins, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors.

Baker said at the award press conference: "Protein design can make the world a better place in health, medicine, and external technology, and I am very excited about this."

After the award ceremony, when a reporter asked him if he had a favorite protein, he replied, "I like all proteins, I don't want to pick a favorite."

"Proteins are molecules that enable life to exist." Chairman of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Heiner Linke said about Baker's contribution.

"The computational tools he developed now enable scientists to design novel proteins with entirely new shapes and functions, opening up endless possibilities for the greatest benefit of humankind."

AlphaFold2: Solving the protein folding challenge with ai

Hassabis was born in London in 1976, graduated with a major in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with others, and four years later, Google acquired the company for 0.65 billion dollars.

DeepMind's goal is to create general ai, which is AI that can do anything the human brain can do. The company also explores other technologies that help achieve this goal, one of which is AlphaFold.

Jumper was born in the USA. In 2017, he joined the lab as a researcher and worked with Hassabis and others on AlphaFold.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper proposed an AI model called AlphaFold2. With it, they were able to predict the structures of almost all 0.2 billion known proteins discovered by researchers.

The committee wrote in the award citation:

Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by over 2 million people from 190 countries. In various scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create enzymes that can break down plastics.

AlphaFold2 can predict the 3D structure of proteins directly from their amino acid sequences with atomic-level accuracy. It is considered to have solved the 50-year-old protein folding challenge that has plagued humans, rapidly advancing the understanding of basic biological processes and promoting drug design.

Before the model emerged, scientists would take months or even years to accurately determine the shape of a single protein, while AlphaFold2 can accomplish this task in just a few hours or minutes.

In May 2024, Jumper's team released AlphaFold3, which in addition to proteins, can also predict other molecules such as DNA and RNA. Unlike its predecessor, AlphaFold3 is not open source.

Last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Aleksey Ekimov for their discovery of tiny particles called 'quantum dots'. Quantum dots are now widely used in tablet screens, light-emitting diodes (LED) lights, etc.