Grid up for infectious diseases

US researchers, in association with IBM, have teamed up to use the World Community Grid to analyse compounds they hope will discover drugs to treat infectious diseases such as dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis, hepatitis C and yellow fever.

The 'Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together' project, headed by IBM, the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and the University of Chicago, will use the vast computational power of the World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals who donate their unused computer time, making it as powerful as one of the world's top five supercomputers.

Calculations will be run on the grid to find drugs that will stop the replication of the viruses that cause the diseases. Once the compounds are identified through computational analysis, researchers can begin testing these drugs in laboratories and clinics to determine their effectiveness. Researchers estimate that about 50,000 years of computational time is needed to complete the calculations necessary to discover effective antiviral drugs. Running on the World Community Grid, this project may be completed in less than one year.

There are currently 13,186 devices across Australia and New Zealand that support the World Community Grid. The more computer power volunteered, the faster the research will be conducted.

Dr Stan Watowich, lead researcher and an associate professor of biochemistry at UTMB, said that without the grid, researchers would have to make inexact, simplifying assumptions that have proven to be obstacles to previous drug development efforts.

"World Community Grid enables us to perform comprehensive calculations that yield accurate biochemical results, and therefore give us the best chance to discover cures for these serious worldwide diseases," he said.

The first phase of the project will target one of the primary proteins that enables viruses to replicate and will match this protein against a database of more than six million drug molecules that might inhibit virus replication.

The second phase, which is more difficult, will predict which drug molecules bind tightest to the viral proteins and thus have the best chance of inhibiting virus replication.

From these calculations, researchers will hopefully identify several dozen molecules that they can begin testing in the laboratory and clinic, in the next phase in developing drugs for the marketplace.

"Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be a part of the solution to address this very critical health concern," Stanley Litow, vice president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs and president of the IBM International Foundation, said.

"Simply by donating our unused computer cycle time, we can all have a profound effect on how quickly this team can move to the next phase of drug discovery. For example, if 100,000 volunteers sign up within the first week for this project, it could reduce the time required to complete calculations by 50 per cent."

To donate unused computer time to this project, individuals are asked to register on Australians Discovering Dengue Drugs at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and install a free, small software program onto their computers. When computers are idle, for example when people are at lunch, their computers request data from World Community Grid's server.

These computers then perform drug discovery computations using this data and send the results back to the server, prompting it for a new piece of work. A screen saver will tell individuals when their computers are being used. World Community Grid, the largest public humanitarian grid in existence, has an impressive 315,000-plus members and links more than 700,000 computers. However, it's estimated that there will be one billion computers worldwide by 2008, underscoring the potential for World Community Grid's computational power to significantly expand and make an even greater humanitarian impact.

Seven projects have been run on World Community Grid to date, including FightAIDS@Home, which completed five years of HIV/AIDS research in just six months. Additional projects are in the pipeline.