Help The World Out - Help to Beat Avian Flu.

I’ve not blogged this before, so I thought I’d do so now. I know most people have various number crunching programs running on their computers in the background as a part of a larger distributed project (RC5 distributed.net, SETI@Home, etc). So I figured I’d raise awareness of one that I take part in, which I think is quite a cool and useful thing. There’s a distributed project called D2OL that was created for finding drug candidates for different viruses and diseases, it started out with targetting potential biohazard candidates with the impending threat of bioterrorism with things like Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola, etc. This was followed shortly after with candidates for various strains of SARS, and most recently this week they’ve added targets for the H5N1 strain of Avian Flu.

From their website: “D2OL, was first to use computational methods to deploy targets against Anthrax, Smallpox and Ebola, and now is first to have a credible SARS target (A target conserved between pig and human coronovirus, the suspected virus behind SARS).”

So that’s my soapbox done for the day, if you feel inclined and have nothing else using your idle CPU cycles, then give it a try, and you never know, you might be the one that finds a suitable cure candidate for some pretty nasty diseases. Head on over and take a look.