US researcher to share Chemistry Nobel with UK duo

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 to David Baker of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington and the Google DeepMind duo from the UK - Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper. 

David Baker will take one half of the prize money 

“for computational protein design” while the Google DeepMind duo who cracked the code “for protein structure prediction” will share the other half between them.

The Nobel Prize Committee said this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry in Chemistry 2024 is for dwelving deep into the life’s ingenious chemical tools called proteins. 

David Baker has succeeded in building entirely new kinds of proteins while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model for predicting proteins’ complex structures.

These, the Nobel Prize Committee noted, were near impossible feats and hold enormous potential for testifying proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools.

Proteins are formed by 20 different amino acids that are considered as life’s building blocks. David Baker successfully used these blocks to design an entirely new protein. His research group has since produced different protein groups that found use in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper succeeded in creating an AI model called AlphaFold2, which helped to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

The breakthrough came 50 years after scientists started looking for ways to predict the structures of amino acids. AlphaFold2 has helped researchers better understand antibiotic resistance, to create images of enzymes that can destroy plastics.

The ability to predict protein structures and design them is a great advantage for humankind, says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.