IBM’s World Community Grid launches search for new Zika treatment

Data: 23/05/2016

Veículo: Life Science Daily

Link direto para a notícia: https://lifesciencedaily.com/innovation/18185-ibms-world-community-grid-launches-search-new-zika-treatment/ 

IBM’s World Community Grid launched an international study on Friday to identify drug candidates to cure Zika virus, which the World Health Organization (WHO) called a global public health emergency.

The OpenZika project is inviting anyone with a computer or Android device to run an app on their Windows, Mac or Linux devices that automatically performs virtual experiments for scientists whenever the machines are otherwise idle. Through the project, the World Community Grid will power virtual experiments on computers that could form the basis of antiviral drugs to cure Zika virus. The process dramatically increases production speeds compared to a normal laboratory setting while screening compounds from existing molecule databases against models of Zika protein and crystal structures.

The World Community Grid is working with an international team of researchers led in Brazil by the Federal University of Goias, with assistance from Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rutgers University’s New Jersey Medical School, Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, 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,” Carolina Andrade, professor at the Federal University of Goias and OpenZika’s lead researcher, said. “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.”