Folding@Home (FAH) is an initiative that simulates proteins associated with several diseases, searching for indicators that will help medical researchers identify treatments. These are complex problems and your efforts right now are incredibly important to finding treatments faster. FAH loads the research pipeline, generating a data set that researchers can then follow in every step of the process, from identifying which chemical compounds may be effective and how to deliver them, to testing the hypothesis and moving toward human trials.
The Folding@Home project started back in 2000. Much has been accomplished over the course of the past 20 years and Hackaday gives a link to lengthy examples of application in biomedical research section on a Wikipedia page which takes an in-depth look at the impacts.
The effort has identified drug therapies for Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases, it’s been used in drug design for combating HIV and influenza (both are viral), and is used to study how cancer mutates. Now we have the chance to apply that to the COVID-19 virus. On an explain-it-like-I’m-five level, scientists are trying to simulate every possible combination of protein folding patterns, looking for locations that would let medicine grab hold and do some good.
See Coronavirus And Folding@Home; More On How Your Computer Helps Medical Research
On Wednesday morning we asked the Hackaday community to donate their extra computer cycles for Coronavirus research. On Thursday morning the number of people contributing to Team Hackaday had doubl…