Anyone with a computer can help this Covid-19 project

A global project using supercomputers is being conducted to help scientists find the best existing anti-viral drugs that are most effective for treating for Covid-19.

The Washington University School of Medicine’s Folding@home project will utilise supercomputers at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre to better understand protein behaviour in diseases.

The project is calling on anyone with a personal computer to help out, as they can lend any unused background capacity to help power simulations into protein behaviour. These mass simulations will examine how proteins fold and interact with drugs to treat Covid-19 on an unprecedented scale. However, before it can do this, scientists must design drug simulations, which requires a large amount of computing power.  

In viruses, proteins can be used to supress humans’ immune systems and are able to ‘fold’ themselves to change their function and impact. Current experimental methods can determine protein structures, but only reveal a single snapshot of a protein’s usual shape. The scientists working on the project hope that seeing a protein in action could help identify already existing drugs that can potentially treat or disrupt the virus.

STFC’s Hartree Centre, located at Sci-Tech Daresbury in the Liverpool City Region, will provide its supercomputing capabilities to help design and generate potential drugs at speed, enabling them to be distributed more quickly across the network of thousands of Folding@home users and get results faster.

Alison Kennedy, director of the STFC Hartree Centre, said: “We have a hugely powerful supercomputing capability at our disposal here at the Hartree Centre, so our staff were naturally looking for opportunities to contribute to global computational efforts to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. The way this project works is to take a possible compound and use computer simulations to see how it interacts with the virus. It’s not a way to provide a vaccine, but if suitable antiviral compounds are identified, it could help to treat patients who have contracted the virus, which could help them to get better more quickly and reduce the burden on critical healthcare services.”

The project is specifically aiming to identify antiviral therapeutics that disrupt the proteins necessary for the lifecycle of Covid-19.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can contribute to the Folding@home project then visit its website.

The Folding@home team recently held a Reddit #AskMeAnything for the public to ask questions about the project. Read more here.