David Baker, one of the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was interviewed by Endpoints, a biopharmaceutical industry media outlet, on October 18th, local time. In this interview, he talks about the importance of designing proteins from scratch. He believes that proteins can perform an amazing array of functions and have evolved over millions or billions of years to solve problems.
Additionally, the promise of protein design is the ability to design new proteins that solve current problems, as well as problems related to the process of natural selection of proteins in nature. Asked whether he was optimistic or skeptical about AI's approach to optimizing compounds, Baker said, "If you want to predict whether a compound is going to make it through clinical trials or not, it takes compounds, hundreds of thousands of trials, and knowing exactly what happens in each trial so that you can train a very efficient model. We obviously don't have that data."