The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2024 was shared by David Baker “for computational protein design” along with Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday (October 9, 2024) .

Last year the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was jointly awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

The Nobel Prize 2024: An interactive guide

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 works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

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 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.

Linke said scientists had 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.

“Another dream of scientists has been to build new proteins to learn how to use nature’s multi-tool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind.” Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometres in diameter that can release very bright coloured light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

The Prize for Physiology or Medicine, won by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation, kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. The Physics Nobel, announced on October 8, was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on machine learning with artificial neural networks. The winners of the Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences Prize will be declared on October 10, October 11, and October 14 respectively.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10.

The Nobel Prize was created by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who in his will dictated that his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

(with inputs from PTI)