Biochemist David Baker named Clarivate Citation Laureate

David Baker, a pioneer in using computational biology to design new proteins not found in nature, has been named a 2024 Clarivate Citation Laureate.

Baker is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design. He joins 21 others on Clarivate’s list of exceptional researchers whose work has had a groundbreaking impact in their fields.

Clarivate Citation Laureates are individuals who have authored foundational research papers that are exceptionally highly cited by other scientists when reporting on their own studies. These citations acknowledge papers that influenced their work.

Clarivate is an intelligence company that provides data and analysis in the areas of academia and government, intellectual property, and life sciences and healthcare. 

According to the Clarivate announcement, Baker is recognized “for contributions to the prediction and design of three-dimensional protein structures and functions.”

Proteins are the workhorses of living cells, where they help perform a myriad of biochemical tasks. Originally, Baker and his colleagues harnessed computing power to learn how long chains of amino acids fold into proteins. The resulting 3-D shape of protein molecules determines their function in biological systems. His group developed a computer program, called Rosetta, to predict protein structures and later adapted it for protein design. 

His lab then began to create new proteins from scratch and eventually to engineer novel proteins for specific purposes. Advances from the lab are leading to new vaccine candidates, synthetic cell switches, and targeted drug-delivery systems that may help meet critical needs in clinical medicine. Baker’s group is also developing new nanomaterials and is seeking novel ways of using designed proteins for environmental purposes and in energy-production systems. 

For many years, the Baker lab has involved citizen scientists and recognized their contributions in research papers. The online, crowdsourcing computer game FoldIt, for example, allows citizen scientists to work on protein-folding puzzles that assist in predicting protein structures. 

More recently, deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, is also being tapped by the Baker lab to design new protein molecules with desired characteristics. It is bringing speed, efficiency and enhanced accuracy to a time-consuming process, and is expanding scientists’ ability to tackle more complex protein design challenges. Artificial intelligence also poses ethical questions in protein design. Baker has become a leading voice in discussions of these concerns.

Baker is the third UW Medicine scientist to become a Clarivate Citation Laureate. The others, both named in 2022, are geneticist Mary-Claire King and microbiologist E. Peter Greenberg. King was recognized for demonstrating inherited susceptibility for breast and ovarian cancer and discovering the role played by mutations of the BRCA1 gene. Greenberg was noted for investigating how quorum sensing, a form of chemical communication among microbes, regulates gene expression in bacteria.

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