Having someone from TSRI post here would really be useful. Someone to answer some of the questions many of us seem to have, not just about the development and distribution of the drugs that may result from the research, but about the research itself: How big is phase one? What does one result processed by the WCG mean in terms of the project and each phase? Even a little bit more technical information and duscussion about what are computers are crunching.

Perhaps even Dr. Olson himself?

Hi Christine

This must be truly disheartening, and would indicate that the project obviously started with the best of intentions was poorly thought out.
It would only take a few incidents like this to put a huge dent in the concept of grid computing and possibly kill off, in its infancy, a technolgy with a massive potential for doing good. This is particularly so if something as high profile as the FA@H project were to go in a similar direction.

One has to hope that in defining the project selection critera for the WCG, the advisory board took issues like this into consideration.

But hope can only go so far and rather than the press releases, what is needed is for the TSRI, the WCG project selectors and maybe even the members of the advisory board, to enter into conversation with members. After all without the members they would not have the the vast amount of data processing power that have at their disposal.

I don't know what other peoples views are but to me donating CPU time to WCG projects is something alot more personal than just putting money in a collection box and being given a sticker or a ribbon. By watching my points/results clock up I have this sense of achievement and I would hate for it to turn sour.

Having given this some thought, I think that there may be some solutions:
1) For profit drugs developers may be able to patent things by coming up with improvements on the research. Taxol, for example, was never patented, but improved versions, like abraxane, are.
2) Nonprofit, philanthropic drug developers exist, such as the Institute for One World Health and the Institute for Global Therapeutics. The latter is particularly interested in developing AIDS drugs for the developing world.
3) Governments can sometimes provide other inducements when companies will not develop drugs because of the lack of a patent. For example, the US government got taxol into production by providing it with orphan drug protection for ovarian cancer, essentially providing a company with a monopoly to convince it to develop taxol. Of course, AIDS is unfortunately not an orphan disease (a disease that affect so few people that manufacturers aren't interesting in developing treatments), but this strategy should have been considered for the cancer project. Most types of cancer fall into the orphan category in the US, including some really nasty ones.

So, there may be solutions. These are just three that I thought might be possible to overcome the public domain/development issue and there might be others. I just want to make sure that the project leaders consider the possibilities, since I was really disappointed by what seems to have happened to the grid.org cancer project.

I think the UD results are stuck at the Inhibox getting mollecules to test phase.. Just something I remember reading.

But that is also why a lot of people moved across to FaD (which is soon to close) as there, a much improved version of THINK was used which incorporated the ligandfit stage. The 12to14 target covered at UD where complete years ago and since then various other target have been completed (all major targets have been exhasted for proteome, Respiratory, hiv/aids, cancer, malaria.. Where poitential inhibitors for Cancer and HIV have been found (and tested by NIH)

Here is a Site Useful Chemistry with some of the Malaria and HIV molecles found to be potential Inhibitors unfortunatly I don't know which actaul tagets these are looking at, but Useful Chemistry is trying to do it 'Open Source' style.
http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/

Although I'm now of to read how Aids@Home is looking for it's cures, is it Virtual Screening or a Protein Folding approach or another style completely ?

Firstly, I want to thank all of you who have expressed interest in the FightAIDS@Home project, and especially those who are donating your computers to the efforts of our laboratory. With World AIDS Day just passed, we are reminded of the ongoing tragedy of the disease and the continuing need for better, more accessible therapies, as well as effective preventative measures.

I have been following the thread regarding the nature of the computational research that we are undertaking on World Community Grid, and the dissemination of the results that come about. Clearly, our goal is to help in the search for new drug therapies that are more robust in the face of viral drug resistance mechanisms, and that may be more accessible to a wider patient population. As we have stated, the results of the computations that we run on World Community Grid will be published in the open scientific literature (as has all of our HIV-related research). As scientists in a non-profit research institute, we hope that our work will have an impact, both on the disease we are studying, and on the methods that other scientists use in studying other diseases. Clearly, we cannot develop new drugs by ourselves. As many of you have rightly noted, the work that we are doing is a first step in the long and expensive road to new pharmaceutical treatments. Our hope is that our computational research will produce promising new lead compounds. Our collaborators here at The Scripps Research Institute will investigate any promising leads in the test tube and in cell culture, but that is as far as we can take it alone. Typically these promising compounds must be modified to enhance various “drug” characteristics such as bioavailability and to eliminate toxicity. Clinical trials in humans are lengthy and costly, and thus require collaboration with an organization that is willing to underwrite such an effort, and that has the resources and experience to take a “lead” molecule to the point where it can be safely prescribed. The “who and how” of this process depend upon a large number of factors that are difficult to specify or predict in advance. Some of these factors relate to the nature of the leads that we might discover, while others relate to the role that government or other non-profit organizations might be willing or able to play in subsequent development. Thus, while our goal is to help in developing better and more widely-available treatments for HIV infection, the most we can do is to try as best we can to see that this happens.

I greatly appreciate your understanding and support.

Art Olson