Rafael E. Carazo Salas’ Post

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Founder/CEO of CellVoyant and Professor at University of Bristol

Congratulations David Baker, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis on winning the 2024 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 👏👋🥇🥇!! In particular Congratulations from the bottom of my heart to Demis who is both an incredible scientist and entrepreneur as well as an incredible human being whom I have had the pleasure and privilege to know personally since 2 decades, amply deserved and truly inspiring accolade to complement a trajectory hard if not impossible to replicate by anybody that I know. I can remember vividly nearly 2 decades ago when Demis first told me over lunches and discussions about his mindblowing ideas for the future and what became Google DeepMind (congratulations DeepMind!!), as inspiring and mindblowing then as he is now, and then seeing the AI revolution take shape in part propelled by his inspiring leadership. This is superlative and outstanding news for AI (building on yesterday’s news on the Physics Prize) and truly outstanding and superlative news for the AI+bio sector, academically and industrially (all companies in the AI and AI+bio sectors just got a huge instantaneous value boost!), and is the best proof and example that AI has the potential to completely revolutionise the way and pace in which science and medicine and generally societal progress can be achieved. For academic science the fact that both the #NobelPrize in Physics and in Chemistry this year came from work done largely in big companies like Google and DeepMind is an important, humbling watershed moment, as it shows beyond doubt that the best science can & will increasingly be done in industry *not academic publicly funded labs* unless something fundamental changes in how academic science funding & structures work. As societies we depend on free academic science (as in science that can take place with total academic freedom) for our survival and progress, and so this week’s news must serve both as inspiration and a stark reminder that time has come for academic science to evolve together with industrial science and change its ways for the better. Outstanding news! #AI #artificialintelligence #NobelPrize #NobelChemistryPrize #NobelPhysicsPrize #AIbio #machinelearning #ml #datascience #biomedicine #medicalresearch

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BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”   The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.   The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.   Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.   The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function. Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.   In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.   Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind. Learn more Press release: https://bit.ly/3TM8oVs Popular information: https://bit.ly/3XYHZGp Advanced information: https://bit.ly/4ewMBta

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Francisco Javier Brenes, MBA

Sourcing professional with 20+ years of experience. Life Coach at B Better, Circular Economy enthusiast and author. My comments reflect my own opinion only. Let’s connect!

2mo

Time to market those proteins!

Well said Rafael E. Carazo Salas and I think you won some bets, right? :)

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