Dear Volunteers,

On behalf of my research team at Universidade Federal de Goiás in Brazil and our collaborators at four other organizations in Brazil and the US, we are thrilled to announce the launch of the OpenZika project.

Our goal is to accelerate the search for an effective treatment for the Zika virus. In the past year, Zika has become a global public health concern due to its connection to neurological issues in adults and children, as well as its link to microcephaly in the babies of women who contract Zika while pregnant. We will need help from as many volunteers as possible to computationally evaluate over 20 million compounds in just the initial phase (and potentially up to 90 million compounds in future phases) as potential treatments for Zika.

Thank you for your support,

Carolina Horta Andrade