Two European Projects are using Grid Computing Systems to discover new drugs for diseases like malaria and dengue. Grid computing, the major driving force for new approaches towards collaborative large-scale science, to discover new drugs and better understand the diseases. This technology, where the resources of many computers in a network are applied to a single problem at the same time, can reduce candidate compounds from millions to thousands or even hundreds, isolating the most promising candidates and speeding up the discovery process. The new research is particularly important because these diseases are comparatively neglected by large pharmaceutical companies.
Two European projects are currently searching for candidate treatments, the EGEE-based Wide In Silico Docking on Malaria (WISDOM), and Swiss Bio Grid's DENGUE project. This type of research is a hugely important first step in large-scale biological analyses. Here's how it works. Using the FlexX software developed at the Fraunhofer Institute and donated by the BioSolveIT company, WISDOM used the EGEE Grid to match 3-dimensional structures of proteins from the malarial parasite to ligands, chemical compounds that bind to protein receptors.
It takes between a few seconds and a few minutes to model whether there's a match between a protein and a ligand, and the WISDOM project performed the equivalent of 80 CPU-years of calculations in just six weeks.
Drug discovery is probably the most exciting use of Grid technology in the battle against disease, but it is not the only one. The Africa@home project, similar to the Seti@home project, allows people to donate idle CPU cycles in a distributed infrastructure to perform epidemiological modelling. This enables researchers to calculate the impact of vaccines, or the spread of a disease.The grids could also be used to federate databases collecting data on infection and treatment in malaria and dengue, but also in HIV. This is vitally important information that is currently very difficult to collect in Africa.
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