The prize was awarded to David Baker for the computational design of proteins, to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for the prediction of the structure of these compounds.

The Nobel Committee explained that David Baker “achieved the almost impossible feat of constructing completely new types of proteins, while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “developed an artificial intelligence model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins”.

These are discoveries with enormous potential, they point out. Life cannot exist without proteins, and the fact that we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins is a great benefit for mankind, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Last Monday, the Karolinska Institute announced the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology awarded to US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

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