Add Your Computer's Brain To A Disease-Fighting Network

Flickr/US Army Afirca/CCBY2.0 What if instead of sitting idle, your home computer could help cure some of the world’s most devastating diseases? Sound improbable but that is exactly what Anthony Chubb, a molecular biologist at the University College Dublin in Ireland, and his team are doing through a citizen science project called FightMalaria@Home. The goal of FightMalaria@Home is to identify new malaria-fighting drugs since certain parasites are developing resistance to our current anti-malarial drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has already identified tens of thousands of potential anti-malarial compounds but they haven’t identified how they work. Chubb recognized that if any of these drugs were going to help fight malaria, scientists needed to understand how each compound works and which would be dead ends. Chubb and his team figured that they would need a supercomputer to begin sifting through and analyzing the compounds, but that turned out to be a challenge too. ...