Google DeepMind has effectively dismantled the team that developed Alphafold, which helped bring a Nobel Prize, the Financial Times reported on July 29.

Google has reassigned key Alphafold personnel and most original paper authors to other divisions, the report said. Some have already left the company. Alphafold is an AI program that predicts a protein's three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid sequence in minutes rather than years. It is used in drug development and vaccine design, and to identify protein structural changes linked to degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

DeepMind began developing Alphafold in 2018. In 2020, it was also seen as having effectively solved the "protein folding problem" of how amino acids fold themselves into complex three-dimensional structures.

In 2021, Nature published papers on the Alphafold methodology and predictions for the structure of the entire human proteome. DeepMind then opened an Alphafold protein structure database that provides more than 200 million protein structure predictions for free. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Vice President and engineering fellow John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to Alphafold research.

Amid this, Jumper announced in June that he would leave DeepMind and move to Anthropic. Several colleagues also moved to Anthropic with him. DeepMind confirmed it internally transferred other staff to Gemini-related projects, the FT said. Some of the remainder were reassigned to Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet drug discovery company spun out of DeepMind.

Pushmeet Kohli (푸시미트 콜리), Google DeepMind's vice president of research, said the company's strategy over the past 9 years was to set specific goals and focus on big challenges, adding that the strategy has now changed.