Outsmart Ebola Together Project: Statistics & Reflection

For the past semester, our group has been lending our computing power to World Community Grid's Outsmart Ebola Together Project.  In this project, researchers in the Ollmann Saphire laboratory of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolle, California are using World Community Grid to search for drugs to treat patients infected with the Ebola virus.  The computational power donated by volunteers like us is being used to screen millions of compounds to identify those that show promise in disabling the Ebola virus.  The lab has identified two areas within the virus that are vulnerable and have the potential to be used as targets to hit in order to block key stages of the virus life cycle.  These target locations are:

• the surface protein on the Ebola virus that is solely responsible for infection of new human cells
• the shape-shifting "transformer" proteins of the Ebola virus, which adopt different forms at different times to achieve different functions

Once the best candidate drug molecules have been identified, further testings will be performed in order to ensure their potential use in this project.  Screenings like this save researchers from having to perform many years of laboratory work and bring us rapidly closer to finding an antiviral treatment for Ebola.

As of today, the Outsmart Ebola Together Project is only twenty-eight percent complete.  Throughout our time working with this group, our grid completed 9,406 units of work but there is still more to be done.  [See table below to view overall progress of this project]

The Outsmart Ebola Together Project has opened our eyes to both a different aspect of science and service.  Before this assignment, none of us had any idea about what grid computing is or how useful it can be to the scientific community.  It also made us realize that doing service work does not always require an extensive of amount of time and effort outside of our already busy schedules.  You can give back to your community in a big way by being aware of grid computing, downloading a program, and letting your computer do the rest.  We would like to thank Dr. Walker for opening our minds to grid computing and giving us this opportunity to make a difference!