Nordic Life Science 1
CHEMISTRY // PROFILES D E M I S H A S SA B I S &
J O H N J UM P E R ADVANCING AI AS A SCIENTIFIC TOOL Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and John Jumper, Director and Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been honored with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their revolutionary technology for predicting the 3D structure of proteins. T E X T B Y MA L I N O T MA N I E VER SINCE THE 1970s researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this would prove to be a hard nut to crack. In 2020 though, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, whose company DeepMind had already been developing famous artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mastered complex board games like chess, were able to solve this 50-year-old problem – and the breakthrough was a fact. A few years earlier Demis Hassabis’ company DeepMind (founded in 2010) had constructed a computer program based on a convolutional neural network, which they called AlphaFold (AF1). It was trained on Protein Data Bank structures to produce a map of probability distributions for the distances based on multiple sequence alignments. From this map, a potential of mean force could be constructed and optimized by a gradient descent algorithm to generate structures. However, it did not provide an accuracy competitive with experimental structures for the majority of targets. But the next program, AlphaFold2 (AF2), would. Newly employed John Jumper took on a leading role in developing AF2. His previous experience of protein simulation had given him creative ideas about how to improve AF1 and together with Hassabis he co-led the work that fundamentally reformed the AI model. In this new program the neural network model used for AF1was entirely redesigned, the NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG | 59