Crowd-sourcing anti-malarial drug discovery

Goal:

To discover novel anti-malarial drugs.

Context:

Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. The disease is most prevalent in poorer countries, so drug discovery and development is a low priority for pharmaceutical companies. But Plasmodium falciparum continues to evolve resistance to available medication. Discovery of novel drugs needs to happen now in order to be ready to replace existing drugs.

Resources:

 The P. falciparum genome has been sequenced, the proteome has been mapped, and protein expression has been confirmed at various stages in this apicoplexan's life cycle. Numerous crystal structures of target proteins are also available. Huge databases of commercially available small molecules are available.

Problem:

The computational power needed to perform virtual screening of the commercially available compounds against all target protein structures is prohibitive. By paying for this computation and research, the cost of the future drugs will also increase.

Solution:

We aim to harness the donated computational power of the world's PCs by using computers that are in screen-saver mode. This has been shown to be equivalent in power to large supercomputers, and therefore makes the large drug discovery computation possible. If you would like to get involved, please join our BOINC community {add link when BOINC goes live}.