Wed Oct 09 12:11:22 UTC 2024: ## Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 Awarded to Pioneers in Protein Science
**Stockholm, Sweden** – The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their groundbreaking contributions to protein science.
David Baker, from the University of Washington in Seattle, received the award for his work in computational protein design. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both from Google DeepMind in London, were recognized for their development of an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict protein structure.
“This year’s recognized discoveries are about the construction of a fantastic protein,” said the Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Henner Link, according to the Hindustan Times. “The other discovery is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream – to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both discoveries open up immense possibilities.”
In 2003, Baker successfully designed a completely new protein. Since then, his research group has created numerous innovative proteins with potential applications in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and sensors.
Hassabis and Jumper’s AI-driven breakthrough came in 2020 with the launch of AlphaFold2. Their model can predict the structure of almost all of the 200 million proteins identified by researchers – an achievement previously thought impossible.
“Without proteins, life wouldn’t be possible,” stated the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in a press release. “Now we can predict protein structures and design our own, which has the potential to benefit humanity in many ways.”
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry follows the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA.
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