... The FAAH project will continue. We are now in the process of transitioning a significant part of the computational effort to analyzing the mountains of results that have been generated from the generosity and interest of the FAAH community. Virtual screening of new and promising AIDS/HIV targets will also continue, but we, with the participation of Prof. Ron Levy at Temple University, will also be using the computational power of FAAH to examine the existing results to determine the most likely candidates for further experimental evaluation. This is a critical step in the drug development pipeline, since buying or synthesizing "false positive" compounds can be expensive in both time and money. The BEDAM computational procedure developed in the Levy Laboratory applies higher-level (and more computationally intensive) physics-based computations to the FAAH results to evaluate and remove such false positives. In addition, we are developing new data mining procedures that will look at all of the results from FAAH virutal screens to construct new filters that will also increase our rate of true positives before we send our candidates to our collaborators for synthesis and testing. A more detailed description of these efforts will be posted soon in our next progress report. ...

Art Olson