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Professor Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work on proteins, alongside collaborators Professor John Jumper and Professor David Baker. Their work centres around predicting the structure of proteins, the essential building blocks of life found in every human cell. This breakthrough has revolutionized medicine by enabling better understanding of protein structures, helping to tackle challenges such as antibiotic resistance and plastic degradation.
The team developed AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence tool capable of predicting the structure of nearly all known proteins. This has been a significant leap for scientists, who previously struggled to decipher the intricate shapes of millions of proteins, which are critical to understanding their functions in the human body. The Nobel committee hailed AlphaFold2 as a “complete revolution,” and it is now applied to over 200 million proteins worldwide.
Professor Baker, who shares the prize, was honored for his earlier work on designing new proteins from amino acids, a breakthrough that opened doors to innovations in pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Together, their achievements mark a significant shift in the field of computational biology, with AI-driven insights leading the way to new scientific and medical frontiers.
