Google shuts down Nobel-winning AlphaFold project, shifts focus to Gemini

Google has ended its award-winning AlphaFold project, according to the Financial Times. The company has reassigned most key team members, while some, including lead researcher John Jumper, have already left.

AlphaFold is an AI program that accurately predicts protein 3D structures from amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It is used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines, and understand protein changes linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

DeepMind began developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old 'protein folding problem.' In 2021, Nature published AlphaFold's methodology and predictions for the entire human proteome. DeepMind launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions.

In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold. However, Jumper announced in June he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic, followed by several colleagues. Other former staff were reassigned to Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spin-off.

Pushmeet Kohli, VP of research at Google DeepMind, said the company's strategy over the last nine years was to focus on grand challenges, but that strategy has evolved. This move reflects Google's decision to concentrate more resources on developing Gemini.