Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the award-giving body said on Wednesday, for their work on the structure of proteins.

The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (US$1.1 million).

"One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences," the academy said in a statement.

Half the prize was awarded to Baker "for computational protein design" while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper "for protein structure prediction", the academy said.

In 2003, Baker designed a new protein and since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.

Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.

Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

The third award to be handed out every year, the chemistry prize follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week. (Reuters/AP)