Aids Project Lets Home PCS Research New HIV Drugs

NEW YORK - AIDS researchers are asking the world's computer users Monday to join the fight against the disease by donating the power of their idling PCs to the search for new drugs.

The newly expanded FightAIDSHome project, backed by the Scripps Research Institute and IBM Corp., is an example of distributed or grid computing, which can harness thousands of personal desktops and laptops to work together like one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

"There are 650 million PCs in the world, and the more people who get involved, the more power we can devote to fighting AIDS and other significant diseases," said Stan Litow, president of the IBM International Foundation.

Grid technology, which breaks immense number-crunching tasks into small pieces, has already been used to study climate change, gravity and cancer. The SETIhome project, which began the modern era of Internet grid computing in 1999, searches data for signs of extraterrestrial radio signals.

A smaller version of the AIDS project has run since 2000. It is now being taken up by the World Community Grid, a humanitarian initiative that includes more than 170,000 computers and is growing by thousands more each week from individuals, businesses and organizations.

The grid's first project, studying all the proteins in the human body to aid medical research, is nearly complete. The cumulative processing power places the grid among the top 10 supercomputers, IBM said.

The new project on AIDS drugs comes as the HIV virus is evolving to resist current treatments.

The effort uses home computers to test thousands of chemical compounds against variations of a protein found in the HIV virus, one combination at a time, said Arthur Olson, a molecular biology professor at the private Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

He said the project will seek the compounds that prevent the most variations of the virus from reproducing. The most promising will undergo laboratory testing.

Researchers will look at compounds whose effects resemble those of protease inhibitors, drugs that have allowed many people infected with HIV to keep the disease from becoming full-blown AIDS.

"You kind of have an arms race between the drugs being developed and the virus, which is evolving to escape the effect of the drug," Olson said. "We never know when the virus is going to find a solution to the current therapies."

Olson said the project's first phase will test about 2,000 compounds representing a much larger set of similar chemicals against about 200 mutant variations of the HIV protein.

That phase should take about three months, depending on how many computers participate and for how long, he said. A single home computer working constantly would likely take more than 20,000 years.

To participate, computer users download free software from www.worldcommunitygrid.org that allows their otherwise unused PCs to work on small pieces of the larger puzzle.

The software, available for Windows and Linux operating systems, allows participants to watch the research in progress as 3D simulations show the compounds flying around looking for the best way to "dock" with the virus protein.

Olson said it is possible one of the participating computers will come up with a result that will lead to a new drug to treat the disease.

"Everybody is searching," he said. "Somebody is going to find something."

Kandy Ferree, president of the National AIDS Fund, said all computer owners should "take five minutes to join in this effort."

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM launched the World Community Grid a year ago, investing millions of dollars in the technology and support services.

The grid's backers hope to expand to 500,000 PCs to run half a dozen projects each year that could range from researching everything from the Asian bird flu to tsunamis.

Litow said that with enough volunteered PCs - perhaps 1 million - the grid could "essentially become the most powerful supercomputer in the world."

On the Web:

World Community Grid: www.worldcommunitygrid.org

IBM: www.ibm.com

Scripps Research Institute: www.scripps.edu

Grid computing projects: www.grid.org

SETIhome: setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

David Ho's e-mail address is dho@coxnews.com