The classic relationship between poison and medicine is becoming subject to a new wave of influence. Professor David Baker of the University of Washington is a scientist who won the 2024 Noll Prize in Chemistry. Baker is a pioneer who has worked on both protein design and structure prediction. Human proteins are made up of tens to thousands of 20 types of amino acids that are strung together to form the human body. Living organisms, including us humans, have created and used various proteins during the process of evolution. However, proteins that are not part of the process of evolution have also begun to be created artificially. In 2003, Baker succeeded in synthesizing an artificial protein called “Top7” made of 93 amino acids. He created a protein that does not exist in nature. Since this success, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to be used to create proteins that are useful in medicine and other fields. Of course, depending on how the research is done, the groundwork has been laid for the creation of new substances that can be either poisons or medicines.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper along with Baker. They were researchers at Google in the United States. Hassabis and Jumper were recognized for their contributions that have brought innovation to medicine and biology. Hassabis applied advanced AI technology to predict protein structure, dramatically improving the accuracy of predictions. If AI can efficiently find candidates for therapeutic drugs, research can proceed faster. This design makes it possible to quickly predict the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences. AI has made it possible to conduct experiments to investigate and improve functions at an order of magnitude faster. In theory, it will be possible to prepare amino acid sequences that do not exist in nature. It is becoming possible to predict these unknown proteins in a short time and realize practical use in a short time.
While AI is accelerating research on proteins, concerns about misuse are also becoming apparent. The reality is that there is little knowledge about how unknown proteins will react to the human body when administered. When an unknown protein that does not exist in nature is administered, there is insufficient understanding of “how the human body will react.” However, it seems that AI technology is not yet at a stage that it can freely design proteins with targeted structures and functions. While the emergence of many types of artificial proteins brings happiness to humans, we must be careful not to let them become a Pandora’s box that brings a lot of damage.
