Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Protein Structures: Breaking the Wall to Understanding Life

John Jumper

2022 Breakthrough Day Talk Life Sciences

Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. Yet, the structure of these complex molecules has stood as a grand challenge in biology for the past 50 years. However, with the recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, it has become possible to predict the three-dimensional structure of how amino acids fold into proteins. A process that used to take 2 years, now takes 10 seconds.

John Jumper is a chemist, an expert on protein dynamics and senior researcher at DeepMind in London, where he and his team developed the AI system AlphaFold, which is capable of generating predictions of protein structures to atomic precision. At Falling Walls, Jumper discusses how he and his team were able to harness the power of artificial intelligence to make predictions about the shapes of proteins approximately 6 million times faster than was previously possible. This knowledge applied will help us understand how diseases progress, it will help us develop new drugs and unlock avenues of discovery that are currently blocked-off.

John Jumper

DeepMind

John Jumper received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, where he developed machine learning methods to simulate protein dynamics. Prior to that, he worked at D.E. Shaw Research on molecular dynamics simulations of protein dynamics and supercooled liquids. He also holds an MPhil in Physics from the University of Cambridge and a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University. At DeepMind, John is leading the development of new methods to apply machine learning to protein biology.

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