CHICAGO (CBS/AP) – A University of Chicago graduate was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with two other scientists on Wednesday for their work discovering powerful techniques to predict and even design novel proteins – the building blocks of life.

John Jumper, who received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in 2012. received. from the University of Chicago in 2017, shared the prize with Dennis Hassabis – who works with Jumper at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research lab based in London – and David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle is working on her work on “protein structure prediction”.

Their work leveraged advanced technologies, including machine learning, and has the potential to transform how new medicines are made.

“It is absolutely extraordinary,” Jumper said in a statement on the University of Chicago website. “I have been working on computational biology for a long time and like to say in lectures: We need this to make it work. We need calculations to solve the problems of biology, and I just love that it’s starting to work.”

Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award recognizes research that solves long-standing scientific mysteries.

“This has been described as a major challenge in chemistry and particularly in biochemistry for decades. That is why it is this breakthrough that is being recognized today,” he said.

Jumper and Hassabis co-invented the AlphaFord system at Google DeepMind. The Nobel Committee wrote that they “used artificial intelligence to successfully solve a problem that has plagued chemists for over 50 years: predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids.”

Jumper is the 19th University of Chicago-affiliated person to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 100th University-affiliated scientist overall to receive a Nobel Prize.

What is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for?

Proteins are complex molecules with thousands of atoms that twist, turn, loop and spiral in countless shapes. The shape of a protein determines its biological function. For decades, scientists have dreamed of being able to efficiently design and build new proteins.

Baker, whose work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since the 1990s, developed a computer program called Rosetta that helped analyze information about existing proteins in large databases to build new proteins found in nature does not occur.

“It seems that this technology can now be used to produce almost any type of protein,” said Johan Åqvist from the Nobel Committee.

Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model that was able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers identified, the committee added.

The duo “managed to crack the code. Through clever use of artificial intelligence, they were able to predict the complex structure of virtually every known protein in nature,” Linke said.

Why is this work important?

The ability to individually design new proteins – and better understand existing proteins – could allow researchers to develop new types of drugs and vaccines. It could also allow scientists to develop new enzymes to break down plastics or other waste materials and develop fine-tuned sensors for hazardous materials.

“I think there are fantastic prospects for making better drugs — drugs that are smarter and only work at the right time and in the right place in the body,” Baker told The Associated Press.

One example is a potential nasal spray that could slow or stop the rapid spread of certain viruses such as COVID-19, he said. Another is a drug that interrupts the cascade of symptoms known as a cytokine storm.

“That has always been the holy grail. “If you could figure out how protein sequences fold into their respective structures, then it might be possible to design protein sequences to fold into previously unseen structures that could be useful to us,” said Jon Lorsh of the NIH.

Baker said Hassabis and Jumper’s work in artificial intelligence has given his team a huge boost.

“The breakthroughs that Demis and John made in protein structure prediction really showed us the power of AI. And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design, and that significantly increased the power and accuracy,” he said.

How the winners reacted

Baker told the AP that he found out in the early hours of the morning that he had won the Nobel Prize along with his wife, who immediately began screaming.

“So it was a little deafening too,” he said.

Hassabis said in a statement that “receiving the Nobel Prize is the honor of a lifetime.”

One of the UK’s leading technology experts, he co-founded the AI ​​research lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google. DeepMind’s breakthroughs include developing an AI system that mastered the Chinese game of Go and was able to defeat the game’s human world champion much faster than expected.

Jumper said in the same statement that it was an honor “to be recognized for fulfilling the long promise of computational biology, helping us understand the protein world and supporting the incredible work of experimental biologists.”

“It is important evidence that AI will make science faster and ultimately help understand diseases and develop therapeutics,” Jumper said.

More about the Nobel Prize winners

Baker will receive half of the 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) prize money, while Hassabis and Jumper will share the other half.

It is the second Nobel Prize to go to someone with links to Google. Physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton also previously worked at the technology company but later resigned to speak more freely about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Last year, the chemistry prize went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots – tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can emit very bright colored light and whose everyday applications include electronics and medical imaging.

Six days of Nobel Prizes were announced on Monday as Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning – Hinton and John Hopfield – won the physics prize.

The award ceremony for the literary prize continues on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14th.

The prize money comes from an estate of the initiator of the award, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.