Have a computer? Then you can help find a treatment for COVID-19

Published:
June 16, 2020

Author:
Office of Communications

In partnership with Scripps Research, IBM’s ‘OpenPandemics’ enables volunteers to virtually screen potential drugs for the coronavirus.

The “OpenPandemics – COVID-19” screen saver is visible on users’ idle computers. The screening experiment depicts a target protein and drug molecule being evaluated, as well as the progress bar for the computation. (Source: World Community Grid.)

From wearing a mask to the grocery store to canceling that long-awaited trip, people around the world have been playing their part to help stem the spread of COVID-19. Now, a recently launched collaboration between Scripps Research and IBM allows anyone with a computer and an internet connection to aid researchers in actively seeking potential therapies for COVID-19.

The OpenPandemics project is hosted on IBM’s World Community Grid application, a trusted, crowdsourced computing resource that COVID-19 researchers can use for free. The application runs unobtrusively in the background of users’ devices, without slowing their systems. The virtual screening experiments help predict which chemical compounds are likely to be effective at binding and stopping the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection. Promising compounds from these experiments will undergo further testing and analysis for the development of drugs. Attempting to manually screen these compounds in a traditional laboratory would not be possible because it would require a prohibitive amount of resources.

"Tapping the unused processing power on thousands of idle computing devices provides us with an incredible amount of computing power to virtually screen millions of chemical compounds,” says Stefano Forli, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research, and director of the project. “Our joint effort with volunteers all over the world promises to accelerate our search for new potential drug candidates that address present and future emerging biological threats, whether it is COVID-19 or an entirely different pathogen."

Since the launch of the OpenPandemics – COVID-19 project in May, over 46,000 volunteers are actively participating, donating computing power from over 111,000 devices. While more than 17 million screening results have already been returned, there are likely over a billion work units that still need to be processed to help identify potential treatments.

Although the project will initially focus on COVID-19, Scripps Research also plans to develop tools and methods to allow future drug discovery projects to ramp up quickly, such as during future pandemics.

How to get involved

To help, volunteers simply need to download the World Community Grid software application, available on PC, laptop, Mac and Android smartphones. The app is free and secure and knows when devices are available to work on a virtual experiment. It knows when to pause during device use, meaning a user’s system is never slowed down. These calculations can be conducted automatically without user input, so no prior scientific or technical expertise is required.