US biochemist David Baker and Google DeepMind scientists Sir Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have won the chemistry Nobel Prize jointly for their work to unlock the biological secrets of proteins that underpin life and health.
Baker took one half of the SKr11mn ($1.06mn) award for his research on computational protein design and the DeepMind duo received the other for protein structure prediction, the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm said on Wednesday.
The prize recognises big advances in techniques to understand how proteins function and interact to make living cells work. The methods, including DeepMind’s artificial intelligence-driven AlphaFold models, have raised hopes they could be powerful tools in the development of new therapies for hard-to-treat diseases.
Baker, who is director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, had “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins”, the Nobel organisers said. Hassabis and Jumper had “developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures”.