Dear World Community Grid Members,
Welcome to the Global Online Fight Against Malaria project!

Malaria is one of the three deadliest infectious diseases on earth. Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria, has killed more people than any other parasite on the planet. In 2006, 247 million people became infected with malaria, and almost a million people died from this disease—most of them children. In fact, it's the leading cause of death in Africa for those under age five. Every 30 seconds, another child dies of malaria. According to the World Health Organization, malaria is both a disease of poverty and a cause of poverty. The survivors of malaria infections are often subjected to impaired learning, other developmental disorders, school absences, lost work, and increased economic distress. Where it's prevalent, this disease can account for 40 percent of all public health costs.

We, the members of the GO Fight Against Malaria team at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, U.S.A. ( http://gofightagainstmalaria.scripps.edu/ ), are performing this project on World Community Grid in order to discover promising candidate compounds that can be developed into new drugs that cure drug-resistant strains of malaria. In this project we will computationally evaluate millions of chemical compounds against different molecular drug targets from the malaria parasite. These computations will estimate the ability of the chemical compounds to disable the particular proteins that the Plasmodium parasite needs to survive, multiply, and infect humans.

Because of the power of World Community Grid, what we can accomplish with one year of the GO Fight Against Malaria project could take us over one hundred years to achieve, using the resources we normally have available. The results computed on World Community Grid will be available in the public domain for all scientists to use and build upon in their research to develop new drugs to fight malaria.

We eagerly await the results that this project will generate, and we look forward to sharing with you the insights that we will gain from these calculations. As this project progresses, we will keep you informed about the details of the experiments we are performing, the progress achieved, and the results that we publish. As you may know from our experience with the FightAIDS@Home project ( http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu ), we will do our best to keep you informed and up-to-date by posting to this Forum and by responding to your questions and comments.

We are very grateful for your willingness to donate your idle computer resources to this ambitious project and to World Community Grid, in general. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us by posting to this Forum.

The GO Fight Against Malaria team at The Scripps Research Institute thanks you very much for your interest and support.

Professor Arthur J. Olson, Ph.D.; member name: “mgl1”
http://mgl.scripps.edu/
Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D.; member name: “mgl_ALPerryman”
http://www.scripps.edu/~perryman/
Stefano Forli, Ph.D.; member name: “mgl_forli”
http://www.scripps.edu/~forli/
Sargis Dallakyan, Ph.D.; member name: “sargis”
http://mgltools.scripps.edu/Members/sargis
Ruth Huey, Ph.D.; member name: “mgl_RHuey”
http://mgl.scripps.edu/group-members
Mike Pique; member name: “terratourist”
http://mgl.scripps.edu/group-members
Associate Profess of Medicinal Chemistry Subhash Sinha, Ph.D.
http://www.scripps.edu/research/faculty/sinha