3 scientists win Nobel Prize in chemistry for breakthrough work on proteins

David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their breakthrough work predicting and designing the structure of proteins.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their breakthrough work predicting and designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.

Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.

“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.

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 said.

“The number of designs that they have, produced and published, and … the variety is absolutely mind blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein with this technology,” said Professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.

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 added.

Linke said scientists had long dreamt of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.