Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis led the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that solved the 50-year protein structure prediction problem by accurately predicting three-dimensional protein structures from amino acid sequences alone, a breakthrough recognized with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. AlphaFold has generated predicted structures for virtually all known proteins, providing cancer researchers with structural models for thousands of potential drug targets that lacked experimental structures. This has accelerated structure-based drug design for oncology targets, enabling virtual screening campaigns and rational drug design for previously intractable cancer targets. The AlphaFold protein structure database has become the most widely used resource in computational cancer biology.