{"id":719417,"date":"2026-07-30T16:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/719417\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T16:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:58:14","slug":"google-deepmind-disbands-its-nobel-prize-winning-alphafold-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/719417\/","title":{"rendered":"Google DeepMind Disbands Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold<\/a> program is no more, according to\u00a0Financial Times<\/a>. Google has reassigned some of the team’s key members and the original authors of its papers to both Gemini-related projects and scientific research endeavors, while a few others have already left the company.<\/p>\n

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’s now being used<\/a> to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.<\/p>\n

DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity’s 50-year-old “protein folding problem,” which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes.\u00a0Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2021, Nature published the papers<\/a> with AlphaFold’s methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human\u00a0proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database<\/a>, giving researchers free access to over\u00a0200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO\u00a0Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind<\/a> to join Anthropic. A couple of his colleagues jumped ship to Anthropic, as well. DeepMind has confirmed to the Times that it also moved staff members internally to Gemini-focused projects. Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.<\/p>\n

As the Times notes, this represents Google’s decision to put more and more of its resources into developing Gemini. “Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges…\u2009a concrete goal every project is focused on,” said Pushmeet Kohli, the\u00a0VP of research at Google DeepMind. “The strategy has evolved.”<\/p>\n

“We are incredibly proud of our scientific heritage and the global impact of AlphaFold, which inspired the launch of Isomorphic Labs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery,” DeepMind spokesperson has told us. “Many of the researchers behind AlphaFold continue today to drive scientific and technological advances across Google, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs.”<\/p>\n

Update 07\/30\/26 6:13AM ET: We updated this post to change the headline to better reflect the news and to add DeepMind’s statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program is no more, according to\u00a0Financial Times. Google has reassigned some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-719417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}