Illustration of Nobel laureates. From left: David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper. Image: Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
The discoveries of David Baker and his fellow Laureates Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper ‘open up vast possibilities’, according to the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Three scientists have been jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry today (9 October) for discoveries in protein design and protein structure prediction.
David Baker was honoured with one half of the award for his innovative work in computational protein design, while the other half went to Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper for their work on an AI model that can predict the structure of nearly all the 200m proteins that have been identified by research.
Baker is a biochemist and the head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. In 2003, he succeeded in using amino acids, which form the structure of a protein, to design a new protein unlike any other. Baker and his team achieved this by using a computer program called Rosetta, which assembles short structural fragments from unrelated protein structures with similar local sequences in the Protein Data Bank (a repository of information about the 3D structures of proteins, nucleic acids and complex assemblies).
Baker and his colleagues showed that the software Rosetta could be used to design a wide range of protein structures. Since then, Baker and his research group have continued to produce unique protein creations that can be applied to use cases in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
Along with his groundbreaking work on protein structure, Baker has published more than 600 research papers, co-founded 21 companies and has been awarded more than 100 patents. His previous accolades include a 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and he was recently included in Time’s 100 most influential people in health for 2024.
Speaking at the announcement, Baker said he was “very excited and very honoured” to accept the award, while also crediting his colleagues Steve Mayo and Bill DeGrado by stating that he “stood on the shoulders of giants” who had shown that protein design was possible.
Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, an AI research company that was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with the tech giant’s other research team, Google Brain, last year to spearhead the company’s AI efforts. Jumper is a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, who, together with Hassabis, developed an AI model called AlphaFold 2 in 2020.
Using AlphaFold 2, they have been able to predict the 3D structure of nearly all of the 200m proteins that researchers have identified when mapping Earth’s organisms. The model does this by training on all the known amino acid sequences and determined protein structures. DeepMind previously stated that the AlphaFold model could help solve “biological mysteries”, and tackle issues such as plastic pollution and antibiotic resistance.
The latest iteration of the model – AlphaFold 3 – was released in May through a collaboration between DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, which was also founded by Hassabis. The companies claimed that this latest model has improved prediction capabilities and could be used to boost drug discovery efforts.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said that the discoveries recognised today “open up vast possibilities”, and emphasised the important consequences of these discoveries. “To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins.”
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