[CAnet - news] International Grid battles malaria

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 [Excerpts from www.gridtoday.com-  BSA]

>From Sheffield to Singapore, International Grid Battles Malaria

  
  Malaria kills more than one million people each year, most of them 
  young children living in Africa. Now physicists in the UK have shared 
  their computers with biologists from countries including France and 
  Korea in an effort to combat the disease. Using an international 
  computing Grid spanning 27 countries, scientists on the WISDOM project 
  analysed an average of 80,000 possible drug compounds against malaria 
  every hour. In total, the challenge processed over 140 million 
  compounds, with a UK physics Grid providing nearly half of the 
  computing hours used.
  
  The computers are all part of EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), 
  which brings together computing Grids from different countries and 
  disciplines. Up to 5000 computers   were used simultaneously, generating a
total of 2000 GB  (2,000,000,000,000 bytes) of useful data. 
  
  Most of the UK's contribution came from GridPP, a computing Grid 
  funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and 
  built to process data from the world's largest particle physics 
  accelerator, due to be turned on later this year in Geneva. Professor 
  Tony Doyle, the GridPP Project Leader, explains, "Although our Grid 
  was built to analyse particle physics data, when we have spare 
  capacity we're able to share it with other scientists worldwide. In 
  this case, we're happy to have contributed more than two million hours 
  of computer time to help find drugs against malaria." 
  
  This challenge of the international WISDOM (World-wide In Silico 
  Docking On Malaria) initiative ran between 1 October and 31 January. 
  Its analysis of possible docking arrangements between drug compounds 
  and target proteins of the malaria parasite will greatly speed up the 
  search for drugs against malaria. WISDOM uses in silico docking, where 
  computers calculate the probability that molecules will dock with a 
  target protein. This lets researchers rule out the vast majority of 
  potential drugs, so they can concentrate on the most promising 
  compounds in laboratory tests. As well as speeding up the screening 
  process, this reduces the cost of developing new drugs to treat 
  diseases.  
  
  "The impact of WISDOM goes much beyond malaria," declared Doman Kim, 
  Director of the Bioindustry and Technology Institute at Jeonnam 
  National University in Korea. "The method developed can be extended to 
  all diseases and this opens exciting industrial perspectives. Until 
  now, the search for new drugs in the academic sector was done at a 
  relatively small scale whereas the WISDOM approach allows a systematic 
  inquiry of all the potentially interesting molecules." 
  
    
  A second computing challenge targeting avian flu in April and May 2006 
  has significantly raised the interest of the biomedical research 
  community. Laboratories in France, Italy, Venezuela and South Africa 
  proposed targets for the second challenge against neglected diseases. 
  The WISDOM researchers plan a further data challenge on avian flu 
  later in 2007.
  
    In addition to the computing power of the EGEE Grid (of which GridPP 
  is a part), AuverGrid, EELA, EUChinaGRID, EUMedGRID and South East 
  Asia Grid all provided additional resources. The Embrace and 
  BioinfoGRID projects are contributing to the development of a virtual, 
  in silico screening pipeline that will allow researchers to select, 
  for any given target protein, the most active molecules out of the 
  millions of compounds commercially available. 
  

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