This message was originally published on the Google DeepMind Blog.
This morning, Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, along with Dr. John Jumper, director at Google DeepMind, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their groundbreaking work on AlphaFold. This revolutionary AI system predicts the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences. David Baker was also co-awarded for his contributions to computational protein design.
Before AlphaFold, predicting a protein’s structure was a complex and time-consuming process.
AlphaFold’s predictions, available for free through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, have provided over 2 million scientists and researchers from 190 countries with a powerful tool for making new discoveries. The AlphaFold2 paper, published in 2021, remains one of the most cited publications of all time.
AlphaFold’s contributions to science have been widely recognized, earning accolades such as the 2023 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2023 Canada Gairdner International Award, the 2024 Clarivate Citation Laureate award, and the 2024 Keio Medical Science Prize.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long shown incredible potential in scientific research, and AlphaFold serves as a proof of concept. As more scientists embrace AI for data creation, experiment simulation, drug design, complexity modeling, discovering new solutions to existing problems, and leveraging existing knowledge, we can expect to see fundamental scientific breakthroughs in the years to come.
