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David Baker, head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. (UW Photo)
Life is a little different for these days for David Baker, given that he won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. Baker will accept the Nobel Prize award in Stockholm, Sweden on Tuesday.
But the University of Washington professor is surely itching to get back to his lab on campus in Seattle, where he works with students and fellow researchers on the future of protein design, a fast-moving field using state-of-the-art technology to develop new therapeutics, vaccines, biosensors, materials and more.
“I’m basically putting all my focus into pushing the science along as fast as possible, because it’s so exciting right now,” Baker told GeekWire last week.
That’s good news for Seattle’s biotech innovation hub. More than 20 startups have spun out of Baker’s lab, the Institute for Protein Design at the UW, and many have grown up in the Seattle region, bolstering the local technology ecosystem.
Baker doesn’t expect the pace of research and entrepreneurship to stop anytime soon.
“If anything, it’s going to grow in terms of new company formation,” Baker said.
University of Washington biochemist David Baker chats with journalists online after receiving word that he’ll share thie Nobel Prize for chemistry. (Photo by Ian C Haydon / UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design)
Baker has spent the past two decades researching protein design, the process of creating new proteins by determining their amino acid sequences to achieve specific shapes and functions.
Proteins are the molecular machines of life, performing essential tasks like building and repairing tissues, transporting molecules, and driving chemical reactions in cells.
Just as an architect designs a building, scientists like Baker use advanced computational tools to design proteins that can solve real-world problems, such as fighting diseases or creating sustainable materials. This work mimics nature but allows for entirely novel innovations that don’t exist in the natural world.
The same rapid AI advances powering generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are also driving changes in how scientists engineer proteins, allowing them to rapidly prototype and refine designs.
This accelerates the discovery of proteins that can perform specific tasks, such as breaking down plastics, developing new medicines, or improving industrial processes, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in synthetic biology.
“Designing particular biochemical functions is getting more and more advanced,” said Baker, who gave a Nobel Prize lecture this week in Stockholm.
Software developed inside Baker’s lab such as RFdiffusion and ProteinMPNN, and others such as Google’s AlphaFold, are not only more accurate and faster than older tools but also easier to use by non-experts, he said.
The technology doesn’t make new drugs appear magically. But it makes the design of the biochemical function “much more straightforward,” Baker said.
Baker’s research contributed to the development of the world’s first computationally designed protein medicine, a vaccine for COVID-19 that was pioneered by colleagues at UW Medicine. UW says Baker holds more than 100 patents.
Several IPD spinouts have been acquired.
The “secret ingredient” to getting groundbreaking research out in the world? “All the brilliant, super smart, energetic people who come here early in their career from all over the world,” Baker said. “So much of the work has been done by amazing people from abroad who come here and then want to start companies in the U.S.”
Baker shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who have also pioneered computational techniques for predicting protein structure.
