U.S. scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work on decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones, yielding advances in areas such as drug development.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper who discovered powerful techniques to predict and even design novel proteins — the building blocks of life.

Half the prize goes to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind for using AI to solve protein folding, and the other to David Baker for tools to help design new proteins.