Google has shut down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project, reassigning most of the team's key members and original authors, while a few others have already left the company, according to Financial Times. AlphaFold is an AI program that predicts three-dimensional protein structures from amino acid sequences in minutes. DeepMind started developing it in 2018, and in 2020 it was recognized as a solution to the 50-year-old "protein folding problem." In 2021, Nature published AlphaFold's methodology and structure predictions of the entire human proteome. DeepMind launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving 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. Jumper announced in June he was leaving for Anthropic, along with some colleagues. DeepMind confirmed it moved staff internally to Gemini-focused projects and reassigned others to Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. "Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges... The strategy has evolved," said Pushmeet Kohli, VP of research at Google DeepMind.