“Proteins are the molecules that enable life”, underlines New Scientist. And the British weekly was amazed to find “proteins throughout the machinery essential to life, from the muscles that give us strength to the antibodies that protect us from infections to the molecules that read and copy DNA.”
This Wednesday, October 9, 2024, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prestigious prize to three researchers working in this field.
“Half of the prize goes to the American David Baker, who succeeded in building proteins of an entirely new kind,” commence Time. The other half goes to the British Demis Hassabis and the American John Jumper, from the company Google DeepMind, “for having developed an artificial intelligence model called ‘AlphaFold’, capable of solving a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins”, continues the Swiss newspaper.
By honoring these three researchers, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry is once again putting artificial intelligence in the spotlight.
Cancer vaccines and treatments
In 2020, protein specialists enthusiastically discovered AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google DeepMind, capable of predicting the 3D shape of proteins based only on the sequence of the amino acids that constitute them. As recalled New Scientist, he could “predict two thirds of protein structures with over 90% accuracy”.
Knowing how proteins fold on themselves is crucial to understanding how they work. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the time to obtain the three-dimensional structure of a large quantity of proteins is reduced.
To the point that these new tools “could help develop more effective vaccines, accelerate research into cancer treatments or create entirely new materials,” list it MIT Technology Review.
David Baker takes the problem from the other end. He “helps researchers who have an exact protein structure in mind find amino acid sequences that fold into that shape,” explains the American magazine. He too has developed several artificial intelligence tools as part of his research.
