World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the generous contribution of computing power from our members, Phase 1 of The Influenza Antiviral Drug Search project finished on October 22, 2009.

The project launched on May 5, 2009. During that time over 67,000 members processed over 3 million results which required almost 3,000 years of computing power from about 150,000 computers.

As part of ending Phase 1 of the project, it has been moved from Active Research to Completed Research on the Research pages and in the Forums.

Utilizing a program called AutoDock, Phase 1 of this project was designed to screen about 3 million compounds for their possible interaction with proteins required by strains of the influenza virus (including drug resistant strains and H1N1) to replicate and spread in the body. About 2,000 of the most promising candidates will be further screened in Phase 2 to eliminate many false positives.

Phase 2 of the project will use a program called CHARMM to perform a more refined screening of the 2,000 candidates obtained in Phase 1. Testing these in the laboratory would be very costly, time consuming, and inefficient. Using the computational power of World Community Grid will greatly accelerate this research.

At this time, the researchers are busy performing post-processing on the results from Phase 1 and are preparing for Phase 2. You may read about these plans and get the latest update from the Principal Investigator, Stan Watowich, in the following forum thread: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,27840

On behalf of the Influenza Antiviral Drug Search project research staff at the University of Texas Medical Branch, USA, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to you for contributing your computer power to this project. With your contribution, this phase of the project was completed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.

While we wait for Phase 2 to start, we still need your help with six (6) other ongoing projects! World Community Grid continues to run the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2, Help Fight Childhood Cancer , Nutritious Rice for the World , Help Conquer Cancer , Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 and FightAIDS@Home . All of these important projects need your computer time.