Google DeepMind CEO wins joint Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on AlphaFold

Demis Hassabis called the award the “honor of a lifetime.”

Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, is one of three researchers to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Biochemist David Baker received half of the prize “for computational protein design,” while Hassabis and fellow DeepMinder John Jumper shared the other half for their work on protein structure prediction.

The pair were recognized for their use of AI to predict protein structures with the DeepMind tool AlphaFold.

In a statement shared with B-17, Hassabis called the award the “honor of a lifetime.”

“AlphaFold has already been used by more than two million researchers to advance critical work, from enzyme design to drug discovery. I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery,” he said.

The Nobel committee praised the recipients for cracking “the code for proteins’ amazing structures,” highlighting Hassabis and Jumper’s achievement of developing “an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.”

“One of the discoveries being recognized 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,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement.

DeepMind presented AlphaFold2 in 2020. Since then, the technology has helped to predict the structure of nearly all the 200 million proteins identified by researchers.

DeepMind has also released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, which includes free-to-access models of microscopic protein structures.

The company said that more than two million scientists and researchers across 190 countries have used the AlphaFold tool since its release.

Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman cofounded DeepMind in London in November 2010.

Google acquired the startup for $400 million in 2014 and later merged it with Google AI’s division, Google Brain, to become Google DeepMind in April 2023.