STOCKHOLM :
THE Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honoured research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure. “That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular, in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.
“The number of designs that they have produced and published, and the variety, is absolutely mind-blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee. Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added. “Proteins are the molecules that enable life. Proteins are building blocks that form bones, skin, hair and tissue,” Linke said.
“To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins.” Linke said scientists had therefore long dreamt of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
“Four years ago, in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.
Baker said Hassabis and John Jumper’s artificial intelligence work gave his team a huge boost.
“The breakthroughs made by Demis and John on protein structure prediction really highlighted to us the power that AI could have. And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design and that has greatly, increased the power and accuracy,” he said.
Baker told the Associated Press that the win was exciting. He found out during the early hours of the morning alongside his wife, who immediately started screaming.
In an open call with the Nobel officials and journalists who attended the announcement in Stockholm, Baker was asked if he had a favorite protein.
He said, he loves them all.