Hi all,
I think the direction in which the World Commnity Grid staff is moving with regard to communications to users is a very good one: it is important to update users about scientific progresses made thanks to their contribution. It can drive curiosity toward science, convince users to continue collaborating and help to involve new volunteers.
The monthly update from the active projects in the news section is a very good thing. Nonetheless, everyone knows that scientific research, and in particular bioinformatics research, needs a lot of time, years, to achieve some tangible result. For this reason, I think it would be of extreme importance to gather information from ALL the past projects of the grid, with regard to:
- Publications
- Achievements
- How the data were used / are being used / will be used
- If the project is still active in some other form (e.g. wet lab research, AI analysis on data...)
- If the project inspired new researches
- If it was a success/unsuccess
- …..
I think this is of extreme interest especially for very old projects (<2012). It can give a tangible measure if WCG’s approach is a good one and it can be the final answer to the question if this is actually a very good project in which to collaborate or not. Moreover, these info can be very exciting for the users and it is definitely a good thing to truly know if all the energy spent in the past years for this projects was useful or not.
I don’t think this would be such a tough thing to do. Closed projects update could be done yearly, so we are talking about writing only one e-mail once a year, something that can be done in few hours. And I also think the scientists who worked in these projects will answer… We gifted them with energy, time, passion for a value comparable to thousand of dollars of computing instances; I don’t think answering to an email once a year is asking too much.
This would be a very exciting research to be done!

The best thing would be if a guy from the staff answer to this post, s/he likes the idea and do everything in the official way. But if the post will be ignored, and if there will be other folks interested like me in doing this, I think we could organize a workgroup of five or less people: we could decide together a nice e-mail text, send it to the researchers and then publish the answers here. What do you think? In case someone is interested PM me or answer here. It is not a very time-consuming thing to do.

PART TWO
What do we already have?
First, the Italian Boinc group BOINC.Italy maintains a very nice page with scientific publications from all the DC computing projects. https://www.boincitaly.org/articoli/scienza-e...ultidisciplinari.html#wcg It is a very complete list but we cannot know if it is completed or not, considered that it was filled only by other volounteers without a direct contact with the researchers. Nonetheless, it is for sure a good starting point, and I strongly suggest WCG admins to implement such a list in the official website, in the same way other projects such as Folding and GPUGrid do.
Second, the english page of Wikipedia for WorldCommunityGrid has a nice list of scientific results from the projects. But it is very outdated, with most of the news from the early 2000s and pointing to a lot of dead links.

PART THREE – PROJECTS LIST

Early times (grid.org)

Smallpox
Last article, 2005, “44 strong treatment candidates had been identified”. Any in vitro test? Any experimental drug?
Anthrax
Wikipedia: “The project was operated from January 22, 2002 until February 14, 2002 and ended after a total of 3.57 billion molecules had finished screening. The results of the research project were transmitted to biological scientists in order to finish the screening of the computational simulations”… After 18 years, something?
Cancer Research
There were around 150,000 users in the United States and 170,000 in Europe along with hundreds of thousands more in other parts of the world… It used LigandFit… no info available

WCG
Human Protein Folding 2004-2006, 2006-2013
Last publication in Boinc.Italy: 2012
Update in WCG news: 2016
Help Defeat Cancer 2006-2007
B.I. Publication: 2011
WCG news: 2014 (a very complete article, but still open to news uses for the data)
Genome Comparison (2006-2007)
Publication: 2013
Influenza Antiviral Search
Update: 2009 (!)… No news about the announced Phase 2… It ran out of fund perhaps?
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy 2006-2007, 2009-2012
Update: 2019
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together 2007-2009, 2010-2013
Update: 2017 Our current designs, unfortunately, have not yet produced a highly potent dengue protease inhibitor suitable for in vivo testing. Thus, we are shifting our approach for this project and are now screening combinatorial chemistry libraries for protease inhibitor "hits" to use as starting points for "hit-to-lead" improvement. Free energy perturbation calculations and 3-D structure-guided design will be used to improve the potency and physiochemical properties of these hits.
The links below contain the ~1000 lowest (best) scoring small molecules predicted to bind to the catalytic site of NS2B-NS3 proteases from dengue and West Nile viruses that were used in this virtual screening project. We hope this information may be of use to other investigators in their development of computational chemistry tools and/or dengue antivirals.
Computing for Clean Water 2010-2014
Update: 2018 The Clean Water Project made an exciting discovery about the possible applications of carbon nanostructures to water purification, biomedical research, and energy research. Dr. Ming Ma, one of the scientists on the project, recently published a paper that summarizes the current status of work in this field. Probably this project can be considered as fully closed.
Drug Search for Leishmaniasis
Update: 2018 The Drug Search for Leishmaniasis researchers recently conducted lab testing on 10 compounds. The testing showed that none of the compounds were good potential treatments, and the researchers will turn their attention to additional compounds. Probably this project can be considered as fully closed.
GO Fight Against Malaria Project (2011-2013)
Update: 2015 We are now almost done writing the paper on these exciting new results and promising compounds, which we were able to discover using a very novel computational workflow, including the work on World Community Grid. We plan to submit this paper within the next month. As soon as it is published, we will let you know.
Say No to Schistosoma
Update: 2015 From the analysis, three compounds were identified as the most promising substances. For the next steps, we are continuing with in-vitro testing of these compounds to determine whether they might be viable options for treating schistosomiasis.. Did you finish the tests?
Computing for Sustainable Water 2012-2012
Update: 2017
Uncovering Genome Mysteries 2014-2016
Update: 2017 Some of the data are currently being used in projects such as vaccine and drug design against arboviruses such as Zika, dengue, and yellow fever viruses, but also for understanding of the interaction of bacteria with their environment and how this reflects in their metabolic pathways, when free living bacteria are compared with their close relatives that are human pathogens, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis versus environmental mycobacteria.
The Clean Energy Project
Update: 2017 Considering our findings, we are working hard to continue developing what we have learned with this initial study. Our work may have led to the discovery of a new class of non-fullerene acceptors, with excellent properties including low production costs! We will reveal the chemical identities of these exciting derivatives when the paper is published.

RECENT PROJECTS
OpenZika (2016-2019), Update 2020
Outsmart Ebola Together (2014-2018) Update 2018

ACTIVE PROJECT, no info needed

OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Mapping Cancer Markers
FightAIDS@Home
Help Stop TB
Smash Childhood Cancer
Microbiome Immunity Project
Africa Rainfall Project