Dr. Perryman,

Thank you for your response. It was very helpful.

Larry Fine

Hi Jean, Larry, and 7cures,

You are all very welcome.

If it was easy to create new drugs, then it wouldn't take pharmaceutical companies many years (to a couple decades) and half a billion to a billion dollars to discover and develop each one. Nature is amazingly complicated, especially when you are dealing with things on the sub-nanometer scale. And as a biochemist, I believe that all of the intricate details are important (with varying degrees of significance, or course).

The number crunching that you all do on the FightAIDSatHome grid has helped us find some potentially-promising "hits," and it will help us evaluate the potential leads that we make by modifying those hits. Unlike the pharmaceutical companies, we don't have a huge team of hundreds to thousands of researchers who can synthesize and experimentally test many millions of compounds in test tubes and cell cultures. But with the unprecedented computational power of the FA@H grid, we can perform virtual experiments that help us guide and focus the wet-lab experiments on a much, much smaller number of compounds that should have more potential.

I would not be surprised if the FightAIDSatHome team does eventually produce new drugs that are given to actual patients (and I would be surprised if it doesn't). But it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of work, and the massive amount of computers that you all provide us.

Thank you much for your interest and for your CPU cycles,
Dr. Alex Perryman

Hi Larry,

I agree with you wholeheartedly!

Cheers,
Dr. Alex Perryman