The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind's AlphaFold program has been dismantled, marking a strategic shift toward broader AI scientific discovery and a reallocation of resources to focus on Gemini.
Google has reassigned most of the team's key members and the original authors of its papers, while a few others have left the company. John Jumper, the former VP and engineering fellow who led the project, announced in June he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic, along with some colleagues.
AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It is used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines, and understand structural changes in proteins associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to the 50-year-old 'protein folding problem.' The following year, Nature published AlphaFold's methodology and structure predictions of the entire human proteome. The DeepMind AlphaFold Protein Structure Database now provides free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions.
Free access provided via the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.
In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
DeepMind confirmed it moved staff members internally to Gemini-focused projects. Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spin-off.
Our strategy... has been to focus on grand challenges... The strategy has evolved.
This strategic shift gives way to a wider race to build AI systems for scientific discovery. Scientists had previously identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years using methods like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance.