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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
LARGEST PUBLIC RESEARCH GRID
SURPASSES 2.5 MILLION MARK
United Devices, a market leader in secure Grid solutions, announced that
the
number of PCs and servers involved in the company's global Grid has surpassed
2.5 million. These servers, workstations, desktops and notebooks join together
from more than 200 countries and territories to help speed grand-scale cancer
and smallpox research.
"The sheer power of volunteered devices never ceases to amaze us," said
Paul
Kirchoff, vice president of marketing at United Devices. "United Devices is
proud to contribute the software and infrastructure which manages
participation and workload distribution in a scalable and secure manner."
The Cancer Research Project began in April 2001 as collaboration between
United Devices' Grid MPTM Global Grid software and expertise provided by
researchers from Oxford University as an ongoing research project for the
National Foundation for Cancer Research. The project is now nearing completion
of Phase II of its in silico screening for anti-cancer drugs. Phase I screened
a database of 3.5 billion possible drug molecules and produced a very large
number of hits: far more than could be synthesized and tested. All of these
targets have now been taken through Phase II, with the exception of superoxide
dismutase, which proved to be unsuitable for further work.
Developing methods for selecting the best hits for follow-up from the Phase
I
list has been the focus of Phase II. The Cancer Research Grid is close to
having a reasonable number of novel suggestions for synthesis and testing and
is drawing toward a conclusion.
"We envision that these experimental results will help us to refine and
improve our testing methods," said Professor Graham Richards, chairman of the
chemistry department at Oxford University. "Once this has been achieved, we
will need to engage industrial partners to perform the necessary development
work, which will lead to the discovery of genuine and novel cancer drug
candidates."
Late in 2003, Grid.org members also saw the completion of the Smallpox
Research Grid project. The smallpox project, which was launched in February of
last year, made use of the idle time of home computers around the world in
order to find a drug to combat the effects of the smallpox virus after
infection. Volunteers contributed over 39,000 years of computing time during
the six months the project lasted. Thirty-five million potential drug
molecules were screened against eight models of the smallpox protein to
determine if any of the drug-like molecules would bind to the smallpox
protein, rendering it inactive. Preliminary results have dramatically narrowed
the field of molecules that can be considered lead candidates for the next
phase of research.
On Sept. 30, representatives from United Devices, Accelrys and IBM took the
stage at the British Embassy in Washington D.C. to hand over the results of
the Smallpox Research Grid to the U.S. Department of Defense. The results were
given to the Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and
will be tested in lab experiments on its efficacy against Monkey Pox (similar
in structure to smallpox). The results will then go to the Center for Disease
Control in Atlanta, the only site in the nation where experiments are done
with the actual smallpox virus.
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