Find-a-Drug

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Find-a-Drug
Area: Disease control
Target: Finding new drugs for a wide variety of diseases
Operator: Treweren Consultants Ltd.
Country: Great Britain
Platform: United Devices
Website: offline
Project status
Status: completed
Start: 04/18/2002
The End: 12/16/2005

Find-a-Drug was a not-for-profit project by Treweren Consultants Ltd. in England to develop new drugs through volunteer computing . Treweren Consultants also developed the "THINK" software initially used in United Devices' cancer research project. THINK is software for simulating chemical molecules ( computational chemistry ). The two companies later parted ways and Treweren founded his own project, Find-a-Drug, in which an improved and constantly further developed version of the THINK software was used.

In infectious diseases and their control, especially playing proteins an important role, which are produced by disease-causing germs. For example, the parasite Plasmodium falciparum , the causative agent of malaria , produces a protein called plasmepsin 2 , which it urgently needs for its metabolism . If one could develop a chemical that the human body can tolerate that could bind this substance, one would have a new anti-malarial drug, in this case one that disrupts the parasite's metabolism. Pathogens usually contain several different proteins that are suitable as targets for a therapy, so that combination preparations are also conceivable, which can disrupt the metabolism of a pathogen in several ways and thus destroy it.

As part of the Find-a-Drug project, computer simulation was used to examine more or less randomly constructed, theoretical chemical molecules that initially only existed in the computer using a kind of brute force method to determine whether they bind to a certain protein of a pathogen, that is can react with this. The most suitable molecules were then actually created and tested by chemists in the laboratory. As part of the Find-a-Drug project, billions of such chemical molecules were examined, which is why a lot of computing power was required. Therefore, distributed computing was chosen for this project. The results achieved within the framework of the project were passed on to interested researchers, mostly to universities around the world, but some also to companies. Find-a-Drug did not work for profit and occasionally used the money it raised only to maintain the project itself. So far, Find-a-Drug has researched drugs against malaria, tuberculosis , cancer , AIDS , multiple sclerosis and other diseases, and many of the results obtained have already been passed on to universities and tested there in laboratory tests, some with remarkable success.

The official website announced on November 1, 2005 that Find-a-Drug would be terminated on December 16, 2005.

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