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David Baker of the University of Washington, and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Half of the prize is awarded to Baker for his research in computational protein design and the other half is shared by Hassabis and Jumper for protein structure prediction.
The key to understanding protein function is discerning how these long polymers wrap themselves up in space. These wobbly 3D forms determine the arrangement of chemically active side chains and where another molecule might interact with the protein. The researchers awarded the prize today have helped scientists predict those arrangements and design new proteins for specific functions.
During the announcement, Johan Åqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the protein design problem began to be solved in 2003, when Baker’s Rosetta program designed a new protein fold from scratch. However, that was only the beginning. Baker’s lab and others continue to dream up novel proteins that can work as sensors, vaccines, or novel materials. On a call during the announcement in Sweden, Baker remarked, “I stood on the shoulders of giants,” acknowledging important collaborators and forerunners. He closed by thanking his wife, parents, lab members, and collaborators past and present “who did all this work and made this all possible.”
Donald Hilvert, who develops strategies for protein design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, says the award is well deserved. “It is a recognition of the incredible advance that’s been made in the last few years—being able to design proteins with atomic accuracy,” work that Hilvert says Baker spearheaded.
Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind share the other half of the prize for their work on the AlphaFold algorithm that debuted at the 2020 Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction competition. Since then, improved versions of the algorithm have been used to predict the structures of millions of uncharacterized proteins. It is “an ingenious piece of neural network design,” said Åqvist during the prize announcement. But that design was only possible because of decades of open science, including well-annotated databases of protein sequences and the Protein Data Bank, a collection of solved protein structures. The Baker lab also has its own structure prediction software, RoseTTAFold.
Hilvert says that “AlphaFold has revolutionized biological science by providing us pictures of what real enzymes look like, what proteins in our cells look like, and this has catalyzed our ability to design proteins because the AI methods allow you to make hundreds of thousands of different proteins. AlphaFold tells you which of those are likely to fold when you go and produce them experimentally and that is a really important component of the success of the protein design efforts.”
“It's exciting to see work that has really moved things forward, things that a few decades ago you thought there would be no way to do it, and now there are tools that allow you to do it,” says Mary K. Carroll, ACS president and a professor of analytical chemistry at Union College. (ACS publishes C&EN.)
The work of Baker, Hassabis, and Jumper has not just helped academic researchers. Hassabis and Jumper work for Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and in 2021, Hassabis launched Isomorphic Labs to build on AlphaFold for drug discovery. The firm has since partnered with several pharma companies. Artificial intelligence–powered drug discovery and development is a growing area of investment. Meanwhile Seattle, where Baker’s Institute for Protein Design is based, hosts a multitude of Baker lab start-ups such as Vilya, which aims to design therapeutic molecules, and MonodBio, a diagnostic biosensor company.
This is the second Nobel Prize for AI-related research this week. However, when asked whether there was any coordination between the two awards, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry Heiner Linke was clear that each award stands on its own. The chemistry prize was really about a “breakthrough in biochemistry,” he said.
With additional reporting by Chris Gorski, Bethany Halford, and Laurel Oldach
This story was updated on Oct. 9, 2024, to add quotes from Johan Åqvist, David Baker, Mary K. Caroll, Donald Hilvert, and Heiner Linke and more detail about the laureates’ prizewinning work.
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