Miguel Bronchud: 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded for groundbreaking work in proteins
Miguel Bronchud, Co-Founder & Advisory Board at Regenerative Medicine Solutions, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry: Three scientists win for groundbreaking work in proteins. The prize went to David Baker of the University of Washington, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who work at Google DeepMind in London. Baker will receive half the 11 million Swedish kronor (just over $1 million) prize, while Hassabis and Jumper will split the other half. Researchers had long dreamed that there could be a way to predict the 3-D structure of proteins from just knowing the sequences of their individual components that are encoded in DNA. Hassabis and Jumper proved that conventional wisdom was wrong, with discoveries in 2018 and 2020 that relied on artificial intelligence to predict the structure of essentially any protein in nature.
In 2003, Baker, who was born in 1962 in Seattle, and colleagues made their own string of those amino acids, forming a protein that was unlike anything seen in nature. They also developed a computational program that could spell out the protein’s structure. This breakthrough in what’s called “computational protein design” has made it possible for scientists to sculpt novel proteins that are being explored as medicines, nanomaterials, and a host of other tools.
“David Baker opened up a completely new world of protein structures that we had never seen before,” Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel chemistry committee, said at the press conference. “It’s a mind-blowing development.” Hassabis, 48 and from London, and Jumper, who was born in 1985 in Little Rock, Ark.
With their algorithmic AlphaFold model, which the researchers have honed over the years, they created a platform that reached 90% accuracy in its predictions of the structures of hundreds of millions of known proteins. In 2021, Alphabet, DeepMind’s parent company, spun out a new outfit called Isomorphic Labs that aims to apply DeepMind’s protein-folding work to drug discovery.
The UW and DeepMind teams are sometimes portrayed as rivals in the computational biology field. But Baker, who called into the press conference in Stockholm Wednesday morning, said that in part because of DeepMind’s work, the UW researchers have started relying more on artificial intelligence in their protein design, which “greatly increased the power and accuracy.”
Determining the 3D structure and function of proteins- 45 years ago as a Biochemistry part II student at Cambridge University, I used to meet my Gonville and Caius College tutor in the so called “Protein Hut” – literally a brick small hut , right next to the main building of the Biochemistry Dpt on Tennis Court Road.
That little but adorable building was (it no longer exists) precisely where Fred Sanger won his first Nobel Award (the second he won years later for his method to sequence DNA) for determining the exact sequence of amino acids in a protein.”
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