Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

The awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has now been officially announced.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper.

Half of the prize is awarded to David Baker, from the University of Washington in Seattle, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in the United States, for his pioneering work in computer-aided protein design.

The other half of the prize is awarded jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, both of Google DeepMind, London, United Kingdom, for their pioneering work in predicting protein structures.

David Baker achieved something that until then was considered almost impossible: producing proteins of entirely new kinds.

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model to solve a problem that had been going on for half a century: predicting the complex structures of proteins.

The advances made by these three scientists have enormous potential for practical applications.

From left to right: David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper. (Drawings: Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach)

The diversity of life attests to the amazing capacity of proteins as chemical tools. Life could not exist without proteins. These control and drive all the chemical reactions that, together, constitute the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signaling substances, antibodies, and building blocks of various tissues.

Proteins are typically made up of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as the building blocks of life. In 2003, David Baker managed to use these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.

The second award-winning advance consists of the ability to predict protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked into long chains that fold to form a three-dimensional structure, crucial for the function of the protein. Since the 1970s, many researchers had attempted to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but it proved notoriously difficult. However, four years ago there was an astonishing breakthrough.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2. With the help of this, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since its creation, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a host of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and obtain the “building blueprints” for enzymes capable of breaking down plastic.

David Baker was born in 1962 in Seattle, Washington, United States.

Demis Hassabis was born in 1976 in London, United Kingdom.

John M. Jumper was born in 1985 in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)