How Your Own Computer Can Help Cure Alzheimer's

Can your computer help cure disease?

A project based at Stanford University has already used computations running on over 200,000 computers and game consoles around the world in work research is increasing understanding of the causes of diseases such as Alzheimer's. And anyone with a PC, Mac, or Playstation3 and a internet connection can participate.

Once the user downloads a piece of software, idle CPU cycles will be used to solve tiny portions of gigantic simulations of protein folding and misfolding. Stanford-based Folding@home ships out the small chunks of the problem to the user's computers and reassembles them as the solutions are sent back in.

The simulations of protein folding, misfolding, and the associated diseases allow researchers to learn far more than using experimentation alone. And the technology can be used in "computational drug design," where drug molecules can be screened via computer simulation rather than in time consuming real world experiments.

According to Stanford's Dr. Vijay Pande, proteins are "nature's nanomachines ... the molecules in the body that it uses to get everything done." The body uses them to drive biochemical reactions, for structure (skin, bones, muscle, etc), and as antibodies. Pande says that "whenever something needs to get done in biology, odds are, proteins are at work." But before fulfilling its destiny, a protein must "fold" itself into a particular shape. Misfolded proteins are implicated in Alzheimer's disease as well as Parkinson's, ALS, and certain types of cancer.

One of the project's research areas is how the toxic proteins characteristic of Alzheimer's disease form, and ultimately to use this data for drug design.

Pande won the Protein Society's Young Investigator Award in 2006 and was cited for "pioneering contributions to simulation methodology." Some of the other awards the project has received are listed athttp://folding.stanford.edu/awards.html.

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If you have a Sony Playstation3, it's an even more powerful contributor to the project, with a 20x speed increase over a PC.

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Would you rather help predict the 21st century's climate, or fight malaria? Berkeley's BOINC project has numerous other distributed computing projects you can help with.