There鈥檚 never been a better reason to ditch the flying windows or gyrating text drifting across your computer screen. Cancer researchers are offering a new computer screen saver that will use spare processor time on your computer to look for drugs to fight the disease.
Pinching the idea from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the researchers hope that drafting in PC users across the globe will speed up drugs discovery. 鈥淲e鈥檙e going to need perhaps three or four million hours of computing time,鈥� says Graham Richards of Oxford University. 鈥淯sing our own computers, we鈥檇 be dead before we finished.鈥�
To look for new drugs, the team takes 3D computer models of four key proteins that seem to promote cancer 鈥� by encouraging the growth of blood vessels to supply tumours, for example. The models include all the active binding sites of the proteins. 鈥淲e鈥檇 like to design little molecules that would get into these sites and block them,鈥� says Richards.
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His team has designed software that takes one of these proteins and tests if any of a library of about 250 million small molecules would bind strongly to it. All these small molecules exist or should be possible to make.
Anyone with a PC can now download the software to run as a screen saver, processing data when the computer is idle. Each user will receive 100 virtual molecules along with one target protein.
Any 鈥渉its鈥� will be transmitted back to Oxford, where scientists will narrow them down to the most promising molecules. A long series of tests will still be needed to see if the molecule is suitable and safe.
SETI@home, which scans telescope data for life, has already attracted three million users. Richards hopes to recruit similar numbers. 鈥淔rankly, this is more useful than looking for men in interstellar space.鈥�
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