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The team that created Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program and won a prestigious award no longer exists. According to the Financial Times, Google has reassigned most of the team’s key members and the authors of the project’s scientific publications to other areas of work, while several other specialists have already left the company.
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AlphaFold is an AI program capable of accurately predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences in a matter of minutes, rather than years of research. Today, it is used to accelerate drug development, create vaccines, and study structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
DeepMind began developing AlphaFold in 2018. By 2020, the system had already been recognized as the solution to the so-called “protein folding problem,” which humanity had been working on for over half a century. The problem involved determining how amino acids spontaneously form complex three-dimensional structures. It is these structures that determine a protein’s biological role. Over the previous 50 years, scientists had managed to determine the structures of approximately 170,000 proteins using methods such as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team used data from these previous studies to train its AI model.
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In 2021, the journal Nature published research papers detailing the AlphaFold methodology and structural predictions for the entire human proteome – the complete set of proteins produced in the human body. Following this, DeepMind launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, providing researchers with free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who began the project as a research scientist and later became the company’s vice president and technical expert, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
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In June, John Jumper announced that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic, and several of his colleagues followed him. DeepMind also confirmed to the Financial Times that some employees had been reassigned internally to projects related to Gemini. Other former team members were transferred to Isomorphic Labs – an Alphabet company focused on drug development that was spun off from DeepMind.
As the Financial Times notes, this indicates Google’s decision to direct an increasing amount of its resources toward the development of Gemini. “Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges… a concrete goal every project is focused on,” said Pushmeet Kohli, the VP of research at Google DeepMind. “The strategy has evolved.”
“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.”
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