This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their groundbreaking work in protein design and protein structure prediction.The prize highlights the immense potential in the innovative intersection of technical informatics and biological sciences, many of which have already become a reality.

Illustrations by Niklas Elmehed (Source: nobelprize.org)

A day before the announcement of the Chemistry Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize in Physics also shed light on the significance of deep learning systems - constantly presenting new advancements - and novel computer architectures, which now include billions of connections. The Chemistry Nobel Prize focuses on the biological applications of these systems, designed to address problems that traditional computational tools cannot practically solve.

Protein structure prediction and protein design are problems in bioinformatics, and in fact, they are inverses of one another: in the first case, we seek the spatial structure that a given sequence adopts, while in the second, we aim to create a sequence capable of adopting a desired structure. The theoretical solutions to these problems require knowledge of the physical-chemical characteristics of biomolecules and the implementation of complex informatics systems capable of organizing and interpreting the properties of known protein structures. David Baker has made influential and pioneering contributions in both structure prediction and protein design, while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have made their mark with the creation of AlphaFold.

We are proud that the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics at Pázmány is at the forefront of developing and applying non-traditional architectures, such as CNNs (convolutional neural networks) and multi-processor architectures, and is present in the field of AI-based applications, ranging from image processing to biomolecular research. The Faculty’s past and present are closely intertwined with the intellectual legacy of the prize-winning research. In the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs of our Faculty, the engineering and informatics perspectives are prominently bioinspired and focused on biological applications, which also permeates the Nobel Prize-awarded research.