Dr John Jumper, who was invited to give a lecture in the opening plenary session of the 2022 ESHG annual conference, is one of three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The award was given for his work on protein folding, and specifically the development of AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy. Researchers worldwide now use AlphaFold to develop new proteins for vaccines and targeted therapies, as well as determining the structures of proteins that lead to antibiotic resistance.
AI-based modelling has helped enormously in the understanding and designing of proteins, life’s fundamental molecules. That there was such a short time lapse between the advent of AlphaFold and the Nobel underlines how important to the advancement of science the awarding committee considered it to be,” said Professor Alexandre Reymond, co-chair of the scientific programme committee, which organises the scientific side of the annual conference.
“ESHG is pleased to see that its record of picking winners continues. We admire the work of these Nobel laureates and would like to congratulate them and their research teams for this most special recognition – and raise a particular toast to our previous plenary speaker, Dr John Jumper.”