2024 Chemistry Nobel to Baker, Hassabis and Jumper: protein design and prediction
In one sentence The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards half of the 2024 Chemistry Nobel to David Baker for computational protein design and the other half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction with AlphaFold2.
On October 9, 2024, the day after the Physics Nobel went to two neural-network pioneers, the Chemistry Nobel also rewards computation and AI.
Half the prize goes to David Baker, a University of Washington biochemist who in 2003 managed to design on a computer a new protein unlike any known one. Since then his group has created proteins usable as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The other half goes to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for AlphaFold2, the AI model presented in 2020 that predicts a protein's 3D structure from its amino-acid sequence: a problem open for about 50 years. With AlphaFold2 the structure of virtually all 200 million known proteins has been predicted.
Companies
Google DeepMind, University of Washington
Tools
AlphaFold, Rosetta
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Sources