Nobel Prize: What Opportunities Does "Protein Design" Offer Us?

Thanks to these Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, artificial intelligence now reveals the internal structure of proteins, allowing scientists to design new ones. Here's what these advancements could mean for us.

Proteins control all chemical reactions in the human body and serve as essential building blocks for tissues, hormones, antibodies, and more. Therefore, delving into the intricacies of protein structure presents vast opportunities for humanity.

For the past 50 years, scientists have been working to unravel protein structures, and a significant breakthrough has finally been achieved. Three computer scientists were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "designing proteins using computational methods" and unveiling their three-dimensional structures with a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model.

Why Are These Discoveries So Important?

These new proteins could serve as foundational elements for developing new vaccines and other medicines, as well as for creating biological nanomaterials and tiny sensors. The prize was awarded to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, for pioneering new types of proteins, and to Demis Hassabis of University College London and John Jumper, CEO of Google DeepMind in London, for their work on predicting protein structures.

Through computational technology, David Baker has learned how to create entirely new proteins. His research team has already developed numerous unique protein combinations.

Meanwhile, Hassabis and Jumper focused on analyzing protein structures, developing an artificial intelligence model known as AlphaFold. This technology has enabled the prediction of the structure of nearly all 200 million known proteins today. The primary benefit of AlphaFold is its ability to quickly and cost-effectively determine which experimental drugs have potential, accelerating the development of new vaccines and treatments that modern medicine urgently needs.

Google DeepMind recently launched AlphaFold Server, the world's most accurate online tool for predicting how proteins interact with other molecules in a cell. Scientists worldwide can access and use this tool completely free of charge. Sounds fascinating, right?