Laura Tran in The Scientist:
Today (September 21), the Lasker Foundation announced this year’s award winners. John Jumper, a computational biologist at DeepMind, and Demis Hassabis, cofounder and CEO at DeepMind, were awarded the 2023 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for “the invention of AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence (AI) system that solved the long-standing challenge of predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins from the one-dimensional sequence of their amino acids,” announced the Lasker Foundation.
Jumper and Hassabis led the AlphaFold team that revolutionized the field of structural biology by accelerating the process of protein structure prediction with speed and accuracy. Their approach melded together different backgrounds and disciplines, and researchers have adopted the platform to answer diverse biological questions.
…Then in 2021, DeepMind publicly released the source code for AlphaFold and its impressive database of more than 350,000 proteins in collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.6 This database has since grown to more than 200 million structures.
More here.