Crowd-sourced malaria drug discovery

Here's a quick shout out for the FightMalaria@Home project run by Anthony Chubb in UCD, Dublin, which is currently looking for more people to lend compute time to the project.

The goal of the project is to identify the drug targets of the Novartis/GSK malaria datasets (about 19K molecules) through large-scale distributed protein-ligand docking experiments. The details are on the project website, but involve identification of hits using Autodock Vina running on BOINC. Experimental follow-up of the top hits will be carried out.

Consider donating some compute time to this project. The dockings are run when your computer is idle so it shouldn't affect your normal use. The results of the study will be integrated into ChEMBL and be available to everyone.

To get involved, head over to www.fight-malaria.org. Details on the BOINC server can be found here.