Researchers urge public to link PCs to network so spare computing power can help develop a cure for coronavirus
- A downloadable client would utilize your machine’s unused computing power
- The download links your computer into a broader network of computers
- Researchers want to use that extra power to test models of covid-19 cures
- They hope to come up with an antibody therapy that prevents infection
Researchers are calling on the public to lend their computing power in an effort to develop a treatment for novel coronavirus.
In a collaboration between Folding@home Consortium and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the public is being asked to donate unused computing power on their devices to help power models attempting to calculate a cure for novel coronavirus (covid-19).
The initiative involves downloading a free client made by Folding@home that connects your computer to a larger network.
A CDC illustration (pictured) shows morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. The virus is named for the protein spikes that give the appearance of a surrounding corona
Since that network uses the aggregate computing power of all the machines hooked up to the network, it’s theoretically able to crunch more calculations faster than the average method.
‘With many computers working towards the same goal, we aim to help develop a therapeutic remedy as quickly as possible,’ writes Fodling@home in a press release.
By downloading Folding@home here and selecting to contribute to “Any Disease”, you can help provide us with the computational power required to tackle this problem.’
Specifically, the additional computing power will be used to develop a therapeutic antibody that can be used to combat covid-19’s ‘ ‘spike protein’ that binds to an ACE2 receptor inside an infected person’s lungs.
This therapeutic antibody would prevent covid-19’s spike protein from binding to lung receptors and prevent it from infecting lung cells, doctors hope.
While it may sound fairly straightforward, there are myriad factors in how proteins evolve and shift which require complex computer modeling to tell if the treatment would actually work.
‘Proteins are not stagnant—they wiggle and fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles and folds into alternative shapes in order to best understand how it interacts with the ACE2 receptor, so that an antibody can be designed,’ writes Folding@home in a statement.
A SARS virus is pictured. Three monomers of the SARS-CoV spike protein are shown in different shades of red while the antibody is depicted in green
It’s unclear of what the impact of increased computing power would actually be, but for researchers and scientists everywhere, extra tools in the effort to develop a treatment and/or cure for the virus will be welcome.
Estimates for when a vaccine will be ready have range from between one to two years, though it’s still impossible to tell if those timelines are actually realistic.
This week cases of the new coronavirus approached 94,000 while deaths total 3,190 worldwide. Despite worry over the rising number of infections, the death rate remains low and is estimated to between 1 to 2 percent.