2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: AlphaFold

October 9, 2024

Congrats Demis Hassabis and John Jumper! :) 😃

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 winners David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. Illustration: Niklas Elmehed / Nobel Prize Outreach

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”

AlphaFold2, presented in 2020, has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have 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.

I had the privilege of being one of the early contributors to the AlphaFold project at Google DeepMind, working alongside the team that laid the foundations for this incredible achievement.