IBM and the World Community Grid (WCG) have teamed with San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization engaged in basic biomedical science, to launch the Internet-based FightAIDS@Home, a research project dedicated to finding new AIDS therapies.

Launched in November 2004, the WCG is a global community of computer users who have joined the philanthropic technology initiative by donating unused time on their personal computers. The computational power of the WCG has already placed it among the top 10 supercomputers in the world, becoming the first virtual supercomputer devoted specifically to AIDS research.

“Those who are living with AIDS right now, and those who will become infected today, tomorrow or sometime in the future, need our help,” said state Senator Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, in a press release. “AIDS is a massive global problem, and we need a major global program to address it. With World Community Grid, we are harnessing the power of grid computing technology to undertake important AIDS research faster than ever before.”

In the face of evolving drug resistance to the virus, the FightAIDS@Home project seeks to develop new, more robust therapies to prevent the onset of AIDS in individuals infected with HIV. The project is based at Scripps Research Institute’s Olson Laboratory.

“IBM has the manpower and also the marketing muscle to make the project known to a lot more people than we can do on our own,” said Dr. Arthur J. Olson, Anderson Research chair professor at Scripps Research Institute’s department of molecular biology.

“It’s been a real boom for us to partner with the World Community Grid,” he added. “It’s probably increased our computer capacity by a factor of 100 or more.”

The WCG’s first project – the Human Proteome Folding Project – produced a database that describes the structure of approximately 120,000 protein domains that traditional approaches have been unable to describe.

Individuals and businesses, foundations, associations, universities and nonprofit organizations have the opportunity to donate the idle and unused time on their computers by downloading WCG’s free software. There are more than 100,000 individuals volunteering power from 170,000 computers to help find a cure for AIDS through the WCG.

How the WCG works is this: When a computer is idle, an agent requests data on a specific project from the WCG’s server. The computer then performs computations on the data, sends it back to the server and asks for a new piece of work. Using idle computer power in this way accelerates the pace of the research.

“It’s less about connecting data than about making the computational power that’s out there – essentially being unused – useable for scientific computing purposes,” Olson said. “It’s transparent to the person whose computer we’re using because when they’re using it our job goes asleep, and then when they stop using the computer, our job wakes up and starts completing the computation.”

The FightAIDS@Home project existed about five years prior to IBM and the WCG’s involvement, but the maintenance of the computer systems and other technical details took time and resources away from the researchers at Scripps, Olson said.

The main goal of the project is to design new therapeutic approaches that are effective in AIDS treatment in the face of viral drug resistance.

“What we’re trying to do is find new drugs that are not susceptible to the evolution of drug resistance,” Olson said. “The other goal is that we want to be able to find compounds that have this characteristic of being robust against resistance, that are easy to synthesize, which means that hopefully they could produce cheaper, more readily available drugs, especially for third-world countries that cannot afford the current drug regimens.”

Olson said he hopes the FightAIDS@ Home project will progress until they can find promising lead compounds to test in collaboration with synthetic chemists, and molecular and cell biologists. Researchers will examine libraries of compounds and test those against panels of potential mutant HIV proteins that function within the virus itself.

“The reason mutants arise is basically because HIV, in copying its genetic information, makes mistakes. It happens to make a lot of mistakes,” Olson said. “…Our goal is to develop a set of highly effective drugs that will box the virus into a corner so that if it responds to one drug in one way, it can’t respond in the same way to a different drug.”

Olson said the first phase of the project, which aims to produce larger synthetic libraries of compounds to compare against libraries of inhibitors, is expected to take at least three to four months to complete. He estimated the second stage to last six to nine months.

Developing drugs that would completely eradicate reservoirs of the HIV virus is a complex matter due to the uncertainty of the medication passing through the blood/brain barrier, Olson said.

“The question of whether a drug can eliminate all reservoirs of the virus is unknown right now. We don’t know what the answer to that is,” Olson said. “One would hope that that would be possible. Up to this point, even though some drugs have reduced the viral count to miniscule levels, when people have gone off of therapy the virus has come back. I wouldn’t hazard to guess whether it would be possible to eliminate all reservoirs of the virus from infected individuals. It would certainly be great if we could do that.”

For more information about the WCG, visit www.worldcommunitygrid.org.