http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04...rug-compounds-could-exist

Billions of billions of billions of maybe-helpful molecular compounds remain to be discovered, and used for targeting a whole host of medical problems. But who has the time to conjure a novemdecillion drugs? (That number is a 1 with 60 zeroes after it.) Nobody has the tools or the treasure to do that. To help narrow things down, scientists at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh created an imaginary library of every compound that could exist. The sections are all marked out--now chemists can get to work filling them in.

The small molecule universe, or SMU as they call it, is the set of all feasible organic molecules below a certain weight. Small molecules can cross cell walls or bind to cells, while larger molecules above 500 Daltons are too big to be as effective. Chemists led by Duke’s David Beratan built a representative library--in some ways more like an encyclopedia--which contains representations of all those feasible molecular compounds. [...] the team came up with 9 million examples that represent all the regions of the small-molecule universe. You can think of it like an encyclopedia of molecules grouped by type: One example could have billions of subsets.

In this stochastic voyage, the researchers found some interesting things. First, there are apparently large gaps in the existing compound collections, which is both a result of nature’s proclivity for patterns and a result of human builders. Nature uses any available building blocks to create new compounds, while humans in the lab only have a few ingredients to work with. Second, the team found vast regions of emptiness, small molecule dark matter, where countless new compounds may fit in like unknown puzzle pieces.

This is helpful because chemists can use it like a treasure map--they may not know what they’ll find, but the map provides some pathways to get there. “It facilitates the mining of chemical libraries that do not yet exist, providing a near-infinite source of diverse novel compounds,” the authors explain. The source code for this algorithm is available to other researchers, and the paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Breakthrough in HIV Research Enabled by NVIDIA GPU Accelerators
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/Breakth...GPU-Accelerators-9a2.aspx

http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Di...irs-from-forming-29943-2/

Date:4/17/2013

Discovery may help prevent HIV 'reservoirs' from forming

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered how the protein that blocks HIV-1 from multiplying in white blood cells is regulated. HIV-1 is the virus that causes AIDS, and the discovery could lead to novel approaches for addressing HIV-1 "in hiding" namely eliminating reservoirs of HIV-1 that persist in patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy. The study was published today in the online edition of the journal Cell Host & Microbe..."

[OT]This 'reservoir' concept is interesting and physical [was it not the gut in amongst where HIV 'hides'?]. Many years ago knew a guy who was working in the painting/recondition of sea buoys. Then heavy metals, lead?, solvents and what not was in the material, let alone, absent/not enforced use of protective masks back then. He was rather corpulent. At some point he was told that it was best not to loose weight, though he had joint troubles because of overweight, as then the stored 'poisons' would come loose from the fatty tissue. Sadly, he got ill, then died rather quick, of cancer, which is not to say the usually accompanying weight loss was the sure enough tipping point, but if company physicians are starting to tell you not to loose weight, it can be taken as an acknowledgement [We know but we don't tell PG&E story comes to mind]. Stored or not stored, cancer was not something that ran in his family, in early age.[/OT]

The important thing to note is that the two men mentioned in that article have only been HIV "free" for 7 and 15 weeks respectively. Given their lengthy period of infection before the bone marrow transplant, it is possible that there are still latent reservoirs of HIV. If these men stay HIV free for a longer period of time, then it will be a more significant finding that will validate the first BM transplant result.