Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to 3 scientists for work with proteins

STOCKHOLM – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Oct 9 to three scientists for discoveries that show the potential of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to predict the shape of proteins, life’s chemical tools, and to invent new ones.

The laureates are: Dr Demis Hassabis and Dr John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who used AI to predict the structure of millions of proteins; and Dr David Baker at the University of Washington, who used computer software to invent a new protein.

The impact of the work of this year’s laureates is “truly huge”, Dr Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said. “In order to understand how proteins work, you need to know what they look like, and that’s what this year’s laureates have done.”

The prize was also the second this week to involve AI, highlighting the technology’s growing significance in scientific research.

Dr Hassabis and Dr Jumper, the committee said, have used their AI model AlphaFold2 to calculate the structure of all human proteins.

The researchers “also predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have so far discovered when mapping earth’s organisms”, the committee said.

Dr Hassabis and Dr Jumper were part of a team at Google DeepMind, the company’s central AI lab, that developed a technology called AlphaFold.

This AI technology can rapidly and reliably predict the physical shape of proteins and enzymes – the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behaviour of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all other living things.

Biochemists have used the technology to speed up the discovery of medicines, and it could also lead to new biological tools such as enzymes that efficiently break down plastic bottles and convert them into materials that are easily reused and recycled.

Proteins begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define what they can and cannot do.

Before the arrival of AlphaFold, scientists would spend months or even decades trying to pinpoint the precise shape of individual proteins.

AlphaFold could do the job in a few hours or even a few minutes.

When the Google team unveiled the technology in 2020, many scientists had assumed that such a breakthrough was still years away. Scientists had struggled for more than 50 years to solve what was called “the protein folding problem”.

Dr Baker “opened up a completely new world of protein structures that we had never seen before”, Dr Aqvist said.

In 2003, the committee pointed out, Dr Baker “succeeded in designing a new protein that was unlike any other protein”, which it said was “something that can only be described as an extraordinary development”.

His research group, the committee said, “has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors”.

His proteins have been the basis of several potential medical treatments, like an antiviral nasal spray for Covid-19 and a medication for celiac disease.

He has also co-founded more than 20 biotechnology companies.

Who are the laureates?

Dr Hassabis was born in London, where his parents – one a Greek Cypriot, the other a Singaporean – ran a toy store.

His parents were described in a 2014 interview with him by The Standard as “quite bohemian”.

At the time, his mother was working for the department store chain John Lewis, while his father “did lots of different things”, including being a singer-songwriter.

“Neither of them are technical at all, which is quite bizarre,” Dr Hassabis told The Standard.

As a teenager, he was the second-highest ranked under-14 chess player in the world and began designing video games professionally before attending college.

After completing a computer science degree at the University of Cambridge, he founded his own video game company and then returned to academia for a doctorate in neuroscience.

Dr Hassabis, along with a fellow academic and a childhood friend, founded an AI start-up that they called DeepMind in 2010. About four years later, Google acquired it for US$650 million (S$848 million).

DeepMind’s stated goal was to build artificial general intelligence, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

It also explored other technologies that help reach that goal and that can solve particular scientific problems. One of those technologies was AlphaFold.

Dr Jumper was born in the United States. After finishing an undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University and a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge, he completed a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago.

He joined DeepMind as a researcher in 2017 after Google had acquired the lab. Alongside Dr Hassabis and others, he soon began work on what became AlphaFold.

Dr Baker, a Seattle native, earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1984 and later earned a biochemistry doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.

Currently at the University of Washington, he serves as the head of the Institute for Protein Design and is a professor of biochemistry. His research at the institute is focused on the prediction and design of protein structures.

Dr Baker said that he was excited about proteins and their ability to solve problems.

One protein that he and his researchers designed was one that could protect against the coronavirus. When asked by a journalist after the ceremony if he had a favourite protein, he answered, “I love all proteins. I don’t want to pick favourites.”

‘Totally surreal’

When the committee informed the laureates on Oct 9, Dr Baker was sleeping.

“I answered the phone, and I heard the announcement, and my wife began screaming very loudly so I couldn’t really hear very well,” he told reporters.

He said “he turned down 100 calls” while he was on the phone with the Nobel committee.

In a post on the website X, Google DeepMind described the prize as “a monumental achievement for AI, for computational biology, and science itself”.

Dr Jumper took a video of himself sharing the news with colleague over a video call. They hugged and cheered in little squares on his computer screen.

“Glad you guys are all caught up now,” he said.

“It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming,” Dr Hassabis told Reuters. NYTIMES