Google DeepMind scientists win Nobel chemistry prize for AI-assisted research into proteins

Scientists at Google DeepMind, an AI research laboratory, and an American biochemist have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for “enormous” breakthroughs in predicting and designing the structure of proteins.

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder, and John Jumper, who led the development of the firm’s AI model AlphaFold, shared half of the prize. The latter predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence.

Professor David Baker, of the University of Washington, was awarded the other half of the prize. His computational research has led to the creation of entirely new kinds of proteins, applicable in nanomaterials, vaccines, and tiny sensors.

The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools, the press release said on Wednesday. They control and drive all the chemi­cal reactions that together form the basis of life.

Proteins – generally consisting of 20 different amino acids that can be described as life’s building blocks – also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies, and the building blocks of different tissues.

“One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Baker’s aim was to design new proteins that don’t exist in nature. In 2003, he succeeded, and those creations can now be used in various areas.

Another group of researchers has tried for decades to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, which is extremely difficult. However, in 2020, there was a breakthrough – and we need to thank AI for it.

That’s because Hassabis and Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. It helped the scientists to predict the structure of virtually all 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries to better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

“It's totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming,” Hassabis told Reuters, thanking DeepMind and Google, and his colleague Jumper.

“David Baker, we've got to know in the last few years, and he's done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it's really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”

“Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind,” said the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

On Tuesday, the 2024 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to two researchers who essentially laid the foundation for modern AI – John Hopfield, a US professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Toronto University’s Geoffrey Hinton.

Hinton has been widely credited as a godfather of AI but made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.