This year’s prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, and to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, a scientist at the Alphabet unit.
Baker, who has co-founded 21 biotechs (including one of the largest-ever startup launches, Xaira Therapeutics), received one half of the Nobel for his lab’s work on computational protein design. Hassabis and Jumper received their half for work on protein structure prediction, including the AlphaFold models. Hassabis also runs Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, a small molecules-focused drug discovery unit that has pharma partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly.
“We’re always pushing existing methods to the limit,” Hassabis said in an interview with Endpoints News last September. “There’s usually more juice that can be squeezed. But we’re also investigating new ideas, new architectures.”
In awarding the Nobel to the three researchers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted proteins are “life’s ingenious chemical tools” that drive chemical reactions, function as hormones, serve as antibodies and play many other vital roles.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about 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.
Xaira has $1 billion to test whether AI can transform drug R&D. Earlier this year, Baker’s lab showed how their generative AI model can create therapeutically active proteins from scratch.
“This idea of building antibodies from scratch and getting hits out of nowhere, there really hadn’t been a way to do that before,” Baker told Endpoints in April.