ARMONK, N.Y., May 19, 2016
/PRNewswire/ -- IBM's (NYSE: IBM) World Community
Grid and scientists are launching an international study to
identify drug candidates to cure Zika, a fast spreading virus that
the World Health Organization has declared a global public health
emergency.
IBM and a global team of scientists
are inviting anyone with a computer or Android device to
join the #OpenZika project. Volunteers don't need to provide time,
expertise or money to help; they simply run an app on
their Windows, Mac, Linux or Android devices that automatically
performs virtual experiments for scientists whenever the
machines are otherwise idle.
Through the OpenZika project, World Community Grid will power
virtual experiments on compounds that could form the basis of
antiviral drugs to cure the Zika virus, which has been linked
to serious neurological disorders. With dramatically more speed
than possible in a traditional lab, the project will screen
compounds from existing molecule databases against models of Zika
protein and crystal structures. Screening results will quickly be
shared with the research community and general public. Promising
compounds would then be tested in the collaborators'
laboratories.
For the OpenZika project, World Community Grid is working with
an international team of researchers led in Brazil by the Federal University of
Goiás, and with support from Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz
Foundation (Fiocruz); Rutgers University's New Jersey
Medical School; Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; and
the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at
the University of California San Diego.
"Enlisting the help of World Community Grid volunteers will
enable us to computationally evaluate over 20 million compounds in
just the initial phase and potentially up to 90 million compounds
in future phases," said Carolina H.
Andrade, Ph.D., professor at the Federal University of Goiás
in Brazil and the lead researcher
on the OpenZika project. "Running the OpenZika project on
World Community Grid will allow us to greatly expand the scale of
our project, and it will accelerate the rate at which we can obtain
the results toward an antiviral drug for the Zika virus."
The need for a treatment is acute as warmer weather approaches
North America, creating an
environment more conducive to Zika-carrying mosquitoes, and as
international travelers contract and transmit the virus.
Other anti viral research efforts also hold promise. For
example, IBM Research and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and
Nanotechnology announced that they have identified a
macromolecule that could help prevent deadly viral infections such
as Zika. IBM has provided its expertise and resources for
other disease outbreaks, such as Ebola. For instance, IBM's World
Community Grid launched a project on Ebola
research.
In addition, IBM has helped governments track diseases
outbreaks. The company provided a citizen engagement and
analytics system in Sierra
Leone that enables communities affected by Ebola to
communicate their issues and concerns directly to the government.
For that public health emergency, IBM Research also created
opinion-based heat-maps which correlated public sentiment to
reported outbreak locations. IBM scientists have created
a free, open source tool that helps scientists and
public health officials create, use and study spatial and temporal
models of emerging infectious diseases such as Zika.
As part of its citizenship program focused on innovative
solutions to societal problems, IBM created World Community
Grid in 2004 to address researchers' critical need for
supercomputing power. Partially hosted on
IBM's SoftLayer cloud technology, World Community Grid
provides massive amounts of supercomputing power to scientists,
free of charge. It does this by harnessing the unused computing
power of volunteers' computers and Android devices. More than
three million computers and mobile devices used by nearly three
quarters of one million people and 470 institutions across 80
countries have contributed virtual supercomputing power for more
than two-dozen vitally important projects on World Community
Grid over the last 11 years, at a value of more than $500 million.
World Community Grid has helped researchers identify
new potential treatments for childhood cancer,
identifying new materials for more efficient solar cells, and
helping to identify how nanotechnology can filter water more
efficiently. Many of these efforts might not have even been
attempted without the free supercomputing power provided by IBM's
World Community Grid.
To perform such computational experiments, OpenZika researchers
are using a widely used virtual screening tool called AutoDock
VINA, developed by the Olson laboratory at The
Scripps Research Institute. At its
core, World Community Grid is enabled by Berkeley Open
Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open source
platform developed at the University of California,
Berkeley and with support from the National Science
Foundation.
Volunteers can support the OpenZika search for a
cure by joining World Community Grid. IBM also
invites researchers to submit research project proposals to receive
this free resource. For more information about IBM's philanthropic
efforts, please visit citizenIBM.com or follow
@CitizenIBM on Twitter.
Contact(s) information
Ari Fishkind
IBM Media Relations
1 (914) 499-6420
fishkind@us.ibm.com
Angie Hu
IBM Media Relations
914-499-6532
ahu@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM