AlphaFold Hits Three Million Researchers as DeepMind Pushes AI Science Tools Worldwide

AlphaFold Reaches a Global Milestone

Google DeepMind has announced that its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold Protein Structure Database has surpassed three million users across more than one hundred and ninety countries, marking a dramatic expansion of AI-powered scientific research. The database now contains over two hundred and forty million structural predictions covering nearly all known proteins.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Google Senior Vice President James Manyika shared the figures in a commentary published in Fortune, timed to coincide with the India AI Impact Summit taking place February nineteenth and twentieth in New Delhi. The summit is the first major global AI gathering hosted by a Global South nation.

Democratising Science

More than one-third of AlphaFold's researchers are based in low and middle-income countries. Scientists at the National University of Malaysia are using the tool to study Melioidosis, a bacterial disease more deadly than dengue, while researchers at India's Birla Institute of Technology and Science are breeding soybeans resistant to charcoal rot infections.

The AlphaFold system, which earned Hassabis and colleague John Jumper the twenty twenty-four Nobel Prize in Chemistry, solved the fifty-year-old challenge of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. Work that would have taken hundreds of millions of years experimentally is now available freely to anyone.

Expanding the AI Science Toolkit

AlphaFold is just one component of DeepMind's growing portfolio. The company also highlighted AI co-scientist for generating research hypotheses, EarthAI for environmental monitoring, and AlphaGenome, recently published in Nature, which can predict cancer-causing mutations by reading DNA sequences a million letters at a time. Nearly three thousand scientists across one hundred and sixty countries have already adopted AlphaGenome.

In healthcare, DeepMind's diabetic retinopathy detection model has screened six hundred thousand patients, with partnerships in India and Thailand expected to extend coverage to six million more over the coming decade.

A Call for Global Cooperation

The India AI Impact Summit has drawn over twenty heads of state, sixty ministers, and five hundred global AI leaders. Hassabis and Manyika used their commentary to call for collective action, writing that making AI accessible to everyone requires collaboration across companies and governments worldwide.