The 2024 Nobel Prize for chemistry was jointly awarded to David Baker for his work on computational protein design and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for developing technologies to predict the structure of proteins.
- The chemistry prize concerns two areas in the field of protein research: design and structure.
Key points
- Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks.
- In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
- The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function.
- Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult.
- However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough. In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
- Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.
