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The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who used artificial intelligence to “crack the code” of almost all known proteins, the “chemical tools of life” for work, CNN reported.

The Nobel Committee lauded David Baker, a US biochemist, for completing “the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who work at Google DeepMind, for developing an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures – a problem that had been unsolved for 50 years.

“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the committee said as the award was announced in Sweden on Wednesday. The prize, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

Proteins, a string of amino acid molecules, are the building blocks of life. They help form hair, skin and tissue cells; they read, copy and repair DNA; and they help carry oxygen in the blood.

While proteins are built from only around 20 amino acids, these can be combined in almost endless ways, folding themselves into highly complex patterns in three-dimensional space.

The committee said Wednesday’s prize had two “halves.” The first went to Hassabis, a British computer scientist who co-founded Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, and Jumper, an American researcher who also works at DeepMind.

Hassabis and Jumper were honored for using AI to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids, allowing them to then predict the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins.