Thank you for joining Phase 2 of our "Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together" project! Your computers will help identify promising drug leads against global infectious diseases such as dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile and yellow fever. More than 40% of the world's population is at risk for infection by dengue viruses, and each year millions of people are treated for dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever. Additionally, ~2% of the world's population is infected with hepatitis C virus. West Nile and yellow fever viruses also have significant global impact. There are no drugs to effectively treat these diseases. With your generous help, we can continue working together to find cures for these serious global health problems.

Last fall, we completed Phase 1 of this project on World Community Grid. Those calculations identified how thousands of drug-like molecules might bind to proteins of dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile and yellow fever viruses. Phase 2 of this project will complete exacting, but computationally-demanding, free energy calculations to determine how tightly these drug-like molecules bind for the viral proteins. Although the scale of these drug discovery calculations is unprecedented, these calculations are necessary to eliminate Phase 1 false positive results and accurately determine which drug leads to test in the laboratory.

In contrast to most World Community Grid projects where workunits are continuously available until a project ends, Phase 2 workunits may be periodically unavailable. This is because the Phase 2 calculations span three sequential programs, and manual analysis and intervention is required as this project switches between programs and/or target proteins. It is suggested that World Community Grid members allow other Grid projects to run whenever Phase 2 workunits are temporarily unavailable.

Many thanks and best wishes,
Stan Watowich (Project PI)