Dear D2OL Community,

On April 15, 2009, the D2OL distributed computing project will officially end operations.

As this chapter in the history of The Rothberg Institute comes to a close, we wanted to take the opportunity to extend a sincere note of thanks to you, our indcredibly dedicated members who have driven every aspect of this project. We also want to take a few moments to reflect on what we have accomplished and to touch on how the project's results, thanks to your committed efforts, will be leveraged by The Rothberg Institute in the future.

As most of you know, this project set out to develop a viable platform for enabling users from around the globe to use their personal computers (whether PCs, Linux or Unix boxes, etc.) to compute the interactions of small molecule drug candidates with target molecules that likely play prominent roles in specific human disease pathways, including those involved in SARS, Avian Flu, and Smallpox. In the more than seven years that the project has been active, our members have returned results for over 150 million drug candidate-disease target tasks, utilizing over 3000 years' worth of CPU time in the process!

With the computational results available to us, we turn our attention toward harvesting the best possible candidates from this data set and focusing our efforts in the laboratory in order to accomplish our original goal: finding effective real-world treatments for orphan diseases.

As we move forward, we will maintain our list of active and past members who have committed so much time and energy to this project, and we plan to update you periodically on the progress that we're making in the lab. Your efforts have been invaluable in moving us into position to take this next important step, and we truly appreciate the contributions that you have made.

We hope that you have enjoyed participating in this project as much as we have. For all that you have done, thank you!

The Rothberg Institute Staff