Help Conquer Cancer
| Help Conquer Cancer | |
|---|---|
| Area: | Disease control |
| Target: | Improving the X-ray crystallography of proteins to better understand how cancer develops and progresses |
| Operator: | Ontario Cancer Institute, Infrastructure sponsored by IBM |
| Country: | Canada |
| Platform: | BOINC |
| Website: | http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~juris/WCG/wcg-hcc.html |
| Project status | |
| Status: | active |
| Start: | 11/06/2007 |
| The End: | May 29, 2013 |
Help Conquer Cancer is a World Community Grid project for distributed computing . The aim of the project is to improve the X-ray crystallography of proteins, which will mean that previously unknown parts of the human proteome can be described and, in particular, the understanding of the development and course of cancer is improved.
Currently, scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo have performed more than 86 million crystallography experiments for more than 9,400 proteins. As a result, you have 86 million images of these proteins made by X-ray crystallography. Each of these images must be checked for certain properties. A complete analysis of the image material would take almost 100,000 years with a single PC. The aim is to find proteins that are related to cancer and can thus be used for the early detection of cancer. Studying proteins linked to cancer may also enable novel pharmaceutical interventions.
To participate, after registering on the World Community Grid website, a small program (the so-called "Grid Client") must be installed, which is available for Windows , Linux and Mac as part of the BOINC software. This program then gets a task package from the website.
The results of the calculations will be made available to research in the public domain.
Web links
- Homepage of the World Community Grid
- Information page of the World Community Grid on Help Conquer Cancer (English)
- Simple instructions for participating in the Help Conquer Cancer project
- Article in the "Journal of Physics" 2012 (English) PDF