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The World Community Grid (WCG) is currently using donated computer time to advance two cancer initiatives:
Help Conquer Cancer
Researchers involved with the Help Conquer Cancer project seek to a better understand and treat cancer through the use of protein X-ray crystallography. The WCG is aiding this initiative by processing the existing 86 million images of proteins that have gone through the X-ray crystallography screeningpipeline at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HW) in Buffalo, New York. Without the WCG,analyzing the existing pictures would require almost 100,000 years. Improving the pipeline for protein crystallography will allow researchers to more quickly determine the structure of many cancer-related proteins. Researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of protein function and enable the development of potential pharmaceutical interventions to treat cancer.
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
This project is dedicated to finding novel drugs to treat childhood cancers, particularly neuroblastoma. Researchers at Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University are using the WCG to simulate laboratory experiments to test 3 million compounds to determine which ones block three proteins expressed at high levels or abnormally mutated in aggressive neuroblastomas. In the absence of the WCG, researchers note that their investigation would take approximately 8,000 years to complete. Fortunately, the WCG will reduce the time required to conduct analysis to about 2 years.
For more information about these projects and other scientific research projects being aided by the WCG to benefit humanity, readers are invited to visit www.worldcommunitygrid.org. ONA
