The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is announced! Using AI to "create" proteins, AlphaFold developers win the award!

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 cracked the code of the astonishing structures of proteins. The theme of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is proteins - the exquisite chemical tools of life. Laureate Baker successfully accomplished an almost impossible task by constructing entirely new proteins.

The other two co-recipients, 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's DeepMind. Yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the "father of AI," highlighting once again the Nobel Prize's favor towards artificial intelligence.

David Baker: Computational Protein Design Opens New Chapter for Human Health

Baker, born in Seattle, received 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 Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.

He received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing the technology to design novel proteins never seen in nature and for the first time using generative AI to design entirely new antibodies, potentially allowing AI-designed proteins to enter the antibody drug market.

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

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

At the award ceremony, Baker stated, "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 asked by a reporter if he had a favorite protein, he replied, "I like all proteins, I don't want to pick a favorite."

"Proteins are the molecules that make life possible." Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Committee, commented on Baker's contributions

"The computational tool he developed now enables scientists to design new proteins with novel shapes and functions, opening up endless possibilities for the greatest benefit of humanity."

AlphaFold2: Using AI to Solve the Protein Folding Problem

Born in London in 1976, Hassabis graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in computer science. In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with others, and four years later, Google acquired the company for $650 million.

DeepMind's goal is to create general artificial intelligence, AI that can perform any task that the human brain can. The company also explores other technologies that contribute to this goal, one of which is AlphaFold.

Jumper, born in the United States, joined the lab as a researcher in 2017 and worked with Hassabis and others on AlphaFold.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper introduced an AI model called AlphaFold2. With it, they were able to predict the structures of almost all 200 million 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 images of enzymes that can break down plastics.

AlphaFold2 can predict the 3D structure of proteins directly from the amino acid sequence with atomic-level precision. It is considered to have solved the 50-year-old challenge of protein folding that has plagued humanity, rapidly advancing our understanding of fundamental biological processes and facilitating drug design.

Before the model's appearance, scientists would spend months or even decades to precisely determine the shape of a single protein, while AlphaFold2 can accomplish this task in hours or even minutes.

In May 2024, Jumper's team released AlphaFold3, which can predict not only proteins but also 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 applications such as tablet screens and light-emitting diode (LED) lights