Researchers harnessed the power of more than a million personal computers around the world to investigate 3.5 billion molecules in their search for the molecule that might block the anthrax toxin and provide a cure.
By using computer time on machines volunteered by their owners, the project–a collaboration between U.S. and British researchers–winnowed the molecules to 12,000 promising candidates.
“This enabled us to have an enormous amount of [computing] power,” said Graham Richards, chemistry department chairman at Oxford University in Britain, at a Friday press conference. The computational might the scientists put against the research was “beyond the capability of the world’s pharmaceutical industry put together,” he added.
Five people, including two postal workers, died last year from anthrax infections, and others were infected after the bacteria was sent through the mails last fall. No arrests have been made.
Anthrax is a disease that if caught early can be treated with antibiotics. The federal government has given a controversial anthrax vaccine to thousands of military personnel but the vaccine has not been given to civilians. Moreover, the vaccine is in short supply.
The investigators involved in the computer-driven research based their work on a study by Harvard University researchers. That study indicated that a protein involved in the anthrax toxin has a target site, Richards said. If the right molecule could be found, it could block the activity of the toxin.
Using the borrowed computer time, the researchers first narrowed the possible blocking molecules to 300,000, then 12,000.
The researchers borrowed the idea of using “distributed computing” to solve their problem from astronomers. Those experts have used a similar technique to analyze enormous amounts of data collected from radio telescopes in their search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Researchers in that project, as well as the anthrax effort, ship bits of data via the Internet to the computers of people who have volunteered the use of their machines’ processing power. A downloaded screensaver analyzes the data during the computers’ downtime and transmits it back to the researchers.
The British researchers did the biochemistry work while the Americans worked on the computer science. On Friday, the British researchers handed over their results to a Defense Department representative.
