1995 BYI David Baker, PhD Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024
"They cracked the code for proteins' amazing structures."
Congratulations to 1995 BYI and Director of UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, Dr. David Baker, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024! Baker was honored for computational protein design and shares the award with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper from Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction.
This research was a key contributor to a vaccine developed by Baker’s colleagues at UW Medicine, the first protein medicine in the world to be designed computationally.
Read the full press release from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:
“[Baker] “has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors…Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to mankind.”
- Read the press announcement from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- Read an article from UW Medicine's press room
Learn more about David Baker, PhD: