Helping to fight AIDS!
So who would think being a computer geek could mean helping the world fight AIDS? Usually when you think of the people fighting AIDS or Cancer you think of doctors and laboratory researchers. Times have change…
You may recall from a previous post that I became a contributor to the Human Proteome project on the World Community Grid. On the 1-year anniversary of the World Community Grid, which was sometime in the past week, the FightAIDS@Home project was launched.
UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The virus has affected the lives of men, women and children all over the world. Currently, there is no cure in sight, only treatment with a variety of drugs.
Even more challenging, HIV is a “sloppy copier,” so it is constantly evolving new variants, some of which are resistant to current drugs. It is therefore vital that scientists continue their search for new and better drugs to combat this moving target.
Scientists are able to determine by experiment the shapes of a protein and of a drug separately, but not always for the two together. If scientists knew how a drug molecule fit inside the active site of its target protein, chemists could see how they could design even better drugs that would be more potent than existing drugs.
To address these challenges, World Community Grid’s FightAIDS@Home project runs a software program called AutoDock developed in Prof. Olson’s laboratory. AutoDock is a suite of tools that predicts how small molecules, such as drug candidates, might bind or “dock” to a receptor of known 3D structure. The very first version of AutoDock was written in the Olson Laboratory in 1990 by Dr. David S. Goodsell, while newer versions, developed by Dr. Garrett M. Morris, have been released which add new scientific understanding and strategies to AutoDock, making it computationally more robust, faster, and easier for other scientists to use. AutoDock is used on the World Community Grid to dock large numbers of different small molecules to HIV protease, so the best molecules can be found computationally, selected and tested in the laboratory for efficacy against the virus, HIV. By joining forces together, The Scripps Research Institute, World Community Grid and its growing volunteer force can find better treatments much faster than ever before.
I really love the whole idea of using idle time on a computer (ie. the screensaver) to do something useful for the rest of the world. I’ve been a member since 9/22/2005, so only a few months now. However, I’ve already racked up some major scores:
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My Accumulated Points: | 73,177 |
| My Team: | IBM Toronto Software Lab | |
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Statistics Last Updated: | 11/23/2005 12:06:02 (UTC) [1 hour(s) ago]–>
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