In a bid to enhance diagnosis of life threatening diseases like AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer, IBM has formed a World Community Grid in association with leading science educational and philanthropic organizations to create the world's largest public computing network.

The key objective of the Grid is to help identify the possible treatment options through research carried out at multiple global centres. It helps to exploit the unused computational power of the systems. There are over 650 million personal computers users globally. Currently, only around 15 per cent of system capacity is put to use. "This is where the Grid computing has helped to put together the collective power of the individual computers to create a giant 'virtual' system with massive computational strength," Dr Daniel Dias, director, IBM India Research Laboratory told Pharmabiz.

Four projects targeting AIDS, Cancer, Human Genome and Alzheimer's have been created to identify drug compounds.
Under the 'FightAIDS@Home project, promising anti-HIV protease drug compounds have been identified. Synthetic chemists are in the process of incorporating designs of better inhibitors. The research required 'quadrillions' of computations comprising 270 protease mutants.

Through the 'Help Defeat Cancer' project researchers have analyzed several cancer tissue specimens. Experiments are on with antibodies and strains. The results are now being shared for diagnostic purposes under a US government grant to improve the targeted treatment for breast, head, and neck cancers.

The World Community Grid has also helped map all proteins in the Human Genome Project. The first phase of Human Proteome Folding has helped to determine the shape and function of the organisms. The Institute for Systems Biology, USA led by Richard Bonneau will now use the Grid to produce the likely structures for each of the proteins using a Rosetta Score to predict its functions. "The understanding of the human proteins is vital to find cures for diseases," informed Dr Dias.

The Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2) focuses on human-secreted proteins, targeting biomarkers, proteins on cell surface and Plasmodium (organism causing malaria).

The Genome Comparison project will help compare gene sequences of different organisms.

The 'Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy' by Décrypthon is a collaboration between French Muscular Dystrophy Association, French National Centre for Scientific Research and IBM. The project investigates interactions of 40,000 proteins structures to detect the one that causes neuromuscular diseases. The database produced will help researchers design molecules that could provide treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases.

The World Community Grid software operates like a screen saver. When the computers are idle, it automatically requests data from the Grid's server. Computations are performed and the results are returned to the server. It routinely prompt the servers for a new jobs, explained Dr Dias.

Ending May 30 2007, the World Community Grid has 310,000 members with over 680,000 registered work stations. It has a total process run time of around 100,000 years and 100 million results have been sent.