The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to David Baker and jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their pioneering contributions to protein science. Baker will receive half of the prize, while the other half is shared between Hassabis and Jumper.
David Baker, from the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, was recognized "for computational protein design," a testament to his innovative work in creating entirely new proteins.
On the other hand, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind in London, UK, were honored "for protein structure prediction," marking a significant advancement in the field.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, highlighted the importance of this year’s discoveries: “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 their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities.”
David Baker's remarkable journey in protein design began in 2003 when he successfully created a new protein from scratch. His research group has since developed a variety of innovative proteins with potential applications in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and sensors.
Meanwhile, Hassabis and Jumper achieved a groundbreaking milestone in 2020 with the launch of AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence model capable of predicting the three-dimensional structures of nearly all 200 million proteins identified by researchers—an accomplishment that was previously deemed impossible.
This year's Nobel Prize celebrates the remarkable intersection of computational science and biological research, paving the way for new discoveries and advancements in understanding protein functions and applications.
