AlphaFold developers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the 2023 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Abstract

The 2023 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been given to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind for the invention of AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence (AI) system that solved the long-standing challenge of predicting the three-dimensional (3D) structure of proteins from the one-dimensional (1D) sequence of their amino acids. The expression “I alphafolded it” is now something I hear almost every day, whether in the lab, during a thesis defense, or at a scientific conference. This transformation of a noun into a verb, akin to the phrase, “I googled it,” mirrors the revolution that has occurred in biological sciences over the past two and a half years. This change began with the announcement on November 30, 2020 (1), of the success of DeepMind’s AI program AlphaFold, which was developed by a team run by Drs. Hassabis and Jumper (2). They essentially solved Nobel Prize winner Christian Anfinsen’s six-decade-old grand challenge in biophysics - the prediction of the structure of a protein based solely on its primary amino acid sequence (3). The full impact of this development began when AlphaFold and similar programs (4) were made widely accessible in July 2021, fundamentally altering the landscape of biological research. Knowledge of a protein’s atomic level structure is essential for a meaningful understanding of how it functions. Since virtually every biological process involves proteins, this knowledge is critical. These biomolecules can be enzymes, antibodies, or motors found in our muscles, participating in signaling, sensing, motility, immune response, translation, compartmentalization, and regulation. However, the determination of even a single protein structure can be highly laborious. The AI-based breakthrough of providing millions of structures with an accuracy likely comparable to that of experimental methods (5) greatly advances scientific and medical studies on numerous fronts, including areas ranging from drug discovery to protein design and engineering.