Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for work on proteins

The Nobel Prize in chemistry is awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins, the building blocks of life.

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 says.

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 adds.

Hassabis received Israel’s Dan David Prize in 2020.

Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, says 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 says.

“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 adds. “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.”