 "David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper (left to right) have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. (Photo: AP)")
David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded in one half to Baker “for computational protein design” and the second half jointly to Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”, said the Nobel Prize committee on Wednesday.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about research on proteins. While Baker succeeded “with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins, Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model to solve the 50-year-old problem of predicting proteins’ complex structures, said the e Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in a press release.
Since Baker’s feat in 2003, his research group has produced several proteins which can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, according to the release.
With their AI model, Hassabis and Jumper have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, according to the release.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that their discovery confers “the greatest benefit to humankind”.
“Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic. Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.