Trio wins chemistry Nobel for protein design

STOCKHOLM:

Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work revealing the secrets of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence.

The three were honoured for cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, with the jury hailing their work as holding "enormous potential" in a range of fields.

Biochemist Baker, 62, was given half the award "for computational protein design", while Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half "for protein structure prediction," the Nobel committee said.

"David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins," it said in a statement.

In the early 2000s, Baker created a new protein, dubbed Top7, which was entirely different to all known existing proteins.

The Nobel jury described it as a "bolt from the blue" for researchers working in the field of protein design, as those previously created had only been able to imitate existing structures.

It added that his work has led to the creation of proteins that can "lead to new nanomaterials, targeted pharmaceuticals, more rapid development of vaccines, minimal sensors and a greener chemical industry".

Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI model "to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins' complex structures," the jury said of the pair from AI research lab Google DeepMind -- which rose to prominence when its AlphaGo model beat the champion of one of the world's oldest board games Go.

Hassabis, the 48-year-old Google DeepMind CEO and co-founder, and senior research scientist Jumper, who was born in 1985, were among those speculated to be contenders for this year's Nobel for their work on the AI-model AlphaFold. They received the prestigious Lasker Award in 2023.