LONDON >> Three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins — the building blocks of life — were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

The prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that unraveled “a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades.”

“It’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.

Proteins are complex molecules with thousands of atoms that spiral in a countless array of shapes that determine their biological function. For decades, scientists have dreamed of being able to design and build proteins.

Baker, 62, whose work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, created a computer program called Rosetta that helped analyze information about existing proteins in comprehensive databases to build new proteins that don’t exist in nature.

Hassabis, 48, and Jumper, 39, created an artificial intelligence model that has predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have ever identified.

The ability to custom design new proteins — and better understand existing proteins — could enable researchers to create new kinds of medicines and vaccines.

It could also allow scientists to design new enzymes to break down plastics or other waste materials that would neutralize pollution, Baker told a news conference, or even come up with entirely new material for semi conductors.