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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
INTERNET COMPUTING FINDS HIV
INHIBITORS
Find-a-Drug announced that its HIV Internet project has found molecules
which
inhibit the development of HIV. By using the spare computer time of thousands
of PCs connected to the Internet to form a large supercomputer, Find-a-Drug
has the ability to evaluate the drug potential of more than 500 million
molecules and produce a set of molecules that are predicted to inhibit the
development of HIV. Scientists at the US National Institute of Health have
tested a small number of molecules from this set.
"We have found 18 inhibitors for HIV protease" commented Keith Davies,
scientific director of Find-a-Drug. "Most of the existing HIV drugs also
target this protein. However, drug resistance can arise from protein mutations
which is stimulating the search for new inhibitors and other protein
targets".
In the coming months, Find-a-Drug hopes to increase the number of molecules
evaluated by computer and have more molecules tested in the laboratory.
Alternative protein targets will also be evaluated to increase the number of
molecules which are predicted to have inhibition properties. It is hoped that
choosing from a larger number of molecules will help to avoid drug failures
during clinical trials.
The project has so far used around 2,000 years of computer time, and has
involved 20,000 PCs from over 60 countries. Each PC is running a copy of the
THINK software in the background which does not affect normal use of the PC.
All data transferred between the PCs and the Find-a-Drug Internet servers are
encrypted. This is a necessary and valuable precaution to prevent the
introduction of a harmful agent such as a virus on to the computers. PC owners
may participate in the project by downloading the THINK software and molecules
from www.find-a-drug.org. Once
installed, the software does
not
require any interaction by the owner.
To participate visit www.find-a-drug.org.
About Find-a-Drug
The HIV project was launched in July 2003 in collaboration with Dr. Ian
Gilbert of the Welsh School of Pharmacy at Cardiff University. Find-a-Drug was
set up in 2002 by Treweren Consultants (Evesham, United Kingdom) as a
non-profit project using Internet-based computing for drug discovery. In
addition to HIV, Find-a-Drug is examining some cancer, multiple sclerosis,
plague and SARS protein targets. The cancer project continues the work started
in collaboration with United Devices (Austin, Texas) and Professors Graham
Richards and David Kerr of Oxford University in 2001.
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