Crowdsourcing the cloud to find cures for rare and “orphaned” diseases

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory

For over a decade, the University of California, Berkeley has used a virtual supercomputer built from borrowed processing time on over a million "volunteer" PCs across the Internet to process radio signals collected in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That supercomputer, called SETI@Home, has inspired a nonprofit to find treatments for diseases that pharmaceutical companies have ignored—diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and Hodgkin's lymphoma—using the same platform to harness the power of the unused compute cycles on your PC (or tablet or smartphone).

The core technology used by SETI@Home, called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), has already been applied to a number of scientific endeavors beyond searching for extraterrestrials, including computational chemistry efforts on the IBM-sponsored World Community Grid to find cures for diseases such as AIDS (with the Scripps Research Institute's FightAIDS@Home project) and malaria. But the new effort, a non-profit called Quantum Cures, is bringing commercial software originally developed for Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud to the BOINC platform and isdriving it with a hybrid of open-source and commercial management software.

The computational technology behind Quantum Cures is a quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) modeling system first developed by computational chemistry researchers at Duke University. Called Inverse Design, the software—commercially developed by TerraDiscoveries in partnership with Duke University and Microsoft—uses an engineering approach with the same name to search for potential drugs that will interact with proteins related to a disease.