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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 02, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 22
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Applications:
SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE AND ENTROPIA AIM GRID AT AIDS
Entropia Inc, a leading provider of PC grid computing solutions and the Olson
Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the nation's largest
private, non-profit biomedical research organization, have announced
successful completion of the initial phase of the FightAIDS@Home research
project. FAAH accelerates AIDS research by generating and testing candidate
drug compounds against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses.
With the shift to the next stage, the program will become entirely self-
managed by TSRI, which has already begun signing up participants. Those
interested in volunteering computing resources to the project can sign up at
www.fightaidsathome.org/phase2.html.
Using software developed by Entropia, thousands of members contributed their
idle computing resources to the project. Nearly 60,000 machines in 20
countries have been involved in the project, logging just shy of 1,400 years
of continuous computing, and performing over nine million tasks. These
contributed resources effectively functioned as a computer with 14 terabytes
of memory and 1,335 terabytes of disk space.
"The FightAids@Home Project has been of enormous benefit to our research on
drug resistance in HIV therapeutics and Entropia has been a key partner in
this important cause," stated Dr. Arthur Olson, director of the Molecular
Graphics Laboratory at TSRI, and FAAH project leader. "As we ramp up the
second phase and bring the project fully in-house, I look forward to
continuing and expanding upon the foundation laid by the initial project."
"Research is a critical element in the fight against AIDS and this project
shows how powerful harnessing together individual contributions can be in
providing real computing muscle," said John Wark, CEO of Entropia. "It would
not have been feasible for TSRI to perform the massive quantities of analysis
it did without the FightAIDS@Home PC grid, and we are pleased to have been a
part of such an important project."
Thanks to member-contributed computing resources, millions of drug docking
computations have been run on the FAAH network during the past two and a half
years. The project has ably demonstrated that with such massive computational
abilities, researchers can utilize intensive approaches to identify drug
candidates that succumb to resistance mutations and those that are more
resilient to such mutations. An early lead developed during the first phase of
the FAAH project, TL-3, has been shown to be promising against the drug
resistant strains that have arisen from the currently approved HIV Protease
inhibitors. The characteristics of TL-3 have been born out by the FAAH
computational work.
The next phase will build on this research foundation but will run even more
massive co-evolutionary computations to look for optimal drug characteristics
in evading resistance mutations. As more data become available, it will be
integrated into the computations with the goal of developing even smarter
strategies for HIV therapeutics. To learn more and to sign up to become a
member and contribute your computer's idle resources, go to
www.fightaidsathome.org/phase2.html.
About The Scripps Research Institute
The Scripps Research Institute is one of the largest, private, nonprofit
scientific research organizations in the world. It stands at the forefront of
basic biomedical science, a vital segment of medical research that seeks to
comprehend the most fundamental processes of life, and is recognized for its
research in molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, immunology, the
neurosciences, and molecular medicine.
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