Grid Computing Offers New Hope In Race Against Bird Flu

This article details the launch of Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), a computing grid that researchers purport will help to combat the spread of avian flu by speeding up drug discovery against emerging diseases. Launched in September 2007 by a collaboration of European and Asian researchers, the EGEE computing grid combines the power of more than 40,000 computers across 45 countries to boost the pace of anti viral drug discovery.

EGEE powers drug discovery software that allows researchers to compute the probability that a drug-like molecule will dock with active sites on the virus and thus inhibit its action. According to the article, computing grids like EGEE are fast and cheap ways to discover new drug leads.

According to Dr Ying-Ta Wu, biologist at the Genomics Research Center of the Academia Sinica, "We are using EGEE to find new molecules that can inhibit the activities of the influenza virus…During previous challenges using the EGEE grid we discovered about 200 molecules with the potential to become drugs against bird flu."