Google Disbands Nobel-Winning AlphaFold Team

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Google has disbanded the AlphaFold programme team at DeepMind. The dissolution comes two years after two scientists received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on that team.

The Financial Times reported the team’s disbandment. Several key team members and paper authors are now working on the Gemini project and other scientific research.

Meanwhile, several others left the company following the team’s dissolution, as quoted from Engadget on Monday (3/8/2026).

Speaking to the Times, Google said some staff were transferred to projects focused on Gemini and others to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s drug innovation company and a spin-off from DeepMind.

The Times reported that Google’s decision to disband AlphaFold was a way to allocate more resources to Gemini’s development.

Meanwhile, Google DeepMind’s Vice President of Research, Pushmeet Kohli, said the company’s strategy continues to evolve from what has been pursued over the past few years.

“Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges, concrete goals that become the focus of each project. That strategy has evolved,” he explained.

DeepMind developed AlphaFold in 2018. The AI programme was designed to accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from amino acid sequences in just minutes.

The programme quickly achieved success. For instance, in 2020 it was hailed as the solution to the 50-year-old ‘protein folding problem’, answering how amino acids form complex 3D shapes.

The AlphaFold team built on its findings by drawing information from previous work. They then fed that data into the AI to train the programme.

In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold. Jumper himself has since left DeepMind as of June. He followed several other staff to AI giant Anthropic.