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STOCKHOLM — A pair of artificial intelligence scientists won the Nobel Prize for their work on proteins.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction,” according to the academy today.
In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper presented the AI model AlphaFold2 to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequences.
With the model, they have predicted the structure of virtually "all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified."
AlphaFold2 has been used by over two million people from 190 countries.
"Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic," the academy says.
Hassabis, 48, is the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and Jumper, 39, is a director at Google DeepMind.
See more: AI Pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield Win Nobel Prize in Physics
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences also awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to biochemist David Baker “for computational protein design.”
In 2003, Baker used 20 building block amino acids to construct a new protein. Baker's research group has since produced various "imaginative" proteins, including ones that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and sensors.
Baker, 62, is head of the Institute for Protein Design and a professor of biochemistry and several other subjects at the University of Washington.
"Life could not exist without proteins," the academy says. "That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind."
