The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, for their work on using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins. The other half was awarded to David Baker, a professor in biochemistry at the University of Washington for his work on computational protein design. The winners will share an 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) prize pot. This is the second Nobel win for AI in 2024.

“One of the discoveries recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function. Since the 1970s, researchers have tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins researchers identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

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The Nobel Prize