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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / MAY 19, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 20
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Scientific
Applications:
ROTHBERG INSTITUTE LEVERAGES GRID
TECH TO COMBAT SARS
The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases, a non-profit research
institute
devoted to discovering and developing drugs for orphan childhood diseases, has
announced the addition of a recently discovered SARS target to its D2OL (Drug
Design and Optimization Lab) grid computing project. This addition has led to
the installation of D2OL on 29,000 new computers worldwide to speed up its
efforts to identify potential new drugs capable of treating SARS and other
emerging microbial diseases. This platform allows for an exponential growth of
computing power as new volunteers join, surpassing the processing power of
most top-ten supercomputing facilities. D2OL models drug targets identified
from disease-causing microbes and simulates the binding of drug molecules with
targets, in order to identify promising combinations that can potentially kill
the microbe. The approach is similar to testing many keys to identify the one
that will work with a specific lock. D2OL's top candidates are studied in
leading academic laboratories affiliated with The Rothberg Institute (TRI),
including Harvard, Yale, and Fox Chase Cancer Center. D2OL-based drug
candidates for SARS will be sent to Shanghai where collaborators at the Fudan
University will test their ability to stop the growth of actual SARS strains
isolated from patients, with the goal being to develop an effective treatment
against the SARS virus.
"Incorporating SARS targets into our D2OL project enables our scientists to
leverage our quickly expanding online grid computing community to quickly
identify real drug candidates, which will then be validated in laboratories at
a leading Chinese university against the SARS virus. Virtual drug candidate
screening enables anyone with a computer to help scientific teams in our labs
analyze data from research into SARS by simply downloading a small program
located at www.D2OL.com," stated Bonnie E.
Gould Rothberg, M.D., Medical Director for The Rothberg Institute for
Childhood Diseases.
"The ability to update targets quickly as well as the potential for
exponential growth of computing power in a network gives us the capability to
address, in real-time, increased levels of disease arising from new mutations
in emerging pathogens such as SARS", added Gould Rothberg.
"We anticipate receiving the best drug candidates from the D2OL project and
testing those in our laboratories. Fudan University has initiated drug
screening programs for SARS, which is increasingly becoming a significant
public health issue in China," stated Tian Xu, Ph.D., Associate Professor of
Genetics at Yale University, Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, Director and
Professor at the Institute of Developmental Biology and Molecular Medicine at
Fudan University, Shanghai, China and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory
Board of the Rothberg Institute.
"The availability of molecular structures of drug targets and candidate
compounds has opened the door for the application of large scale grid
computing technology to conduct virtual drug design. Through the use of
Sengent's CommunityOS software platform, D2OL leverages volunteers' spare
computing power to effectively discover potential drug candidates. Grid
computing has proven to be a very effective way of tackling intensive
mathematical problems such as those found in drug discovery and financial
modeling," indicated Gioel M. Molinari, Chief Technical Officer at Sengent
Corporation, a Boca Raton, Florida-based software firm specializing in grid
computing who co-developed D2OL in collaboration with The Rothberg
Institute.
"Institutes such as The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases work with
limited research budgets. By leveraging the spare computer processing capacity
of our online network of volunteers, we are making progress toward developing
treatments for rare diseases such as SARS, and childhood diseases including
Tuberous Sclerosis, a rare genetic disorder affecting 30,000-50,000
Americans," added Dr. Gould Rothberg. Data produced by the Institute's network
of computer volunteers is mined by TRI scientists and allows collaborating
laboratories to focus on only the most promising chemical compound leads with
the highest likelihood of becoming successful drug candidates. In the case of
Tuberous Sclerosis, Rothberg-funded scientists have discovered that Rapamycin,
a drug already marketed by Wyeth for immunosuppression following organ
transplantation, is a 'key' that fits into a critical 'lock' for the disease
leading to the initiation of clinical trials testing Rapamycin in patients
with Tuberous Sclerosis in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
D2OL is a grid-computing project that harnesses volunteer computers from
the
online community. The project uses computers' idle time to create a
supercomputer capable of using mathematical and statistical models to rapidly
test the effectiveness of potential drugs to fight the SARS virus. When
installed on a computer, D2OL runs in the system tray and sends results back
to the central servers at The Rothberg Institute when an Internet link is
established.
About The Rothberg Institute
The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases is a private, non-profit
research institution dedicated to discovering and developing drugs capable of
treating the clinical manifestations of Tuberous Sclerosis and other orphan
childhood diseases. The Rothberg Institute operates at the intersection of
modern biology, chemistry and computer science by leveraging technologies
including chemical genomics and grid computing to accelerate its drug
discovery efforts. The Rothberg Institute is headquartered in Guilford, CT.
Additional information is available at www.childhooddiseases.org.
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