Potential New Treatments for Leishmaniasis
Scientific News Updates
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Today I would like to share with you some of the good news that can be out of collaboration and distributed computing. World Community Grid, a philanthropic initiative of IBM Corporate Citizenship, that runs on a platform called BOINC, once ran a project in the search for better drugs against a by parasitical insects in tropical countries. The tropical disease we are talking about today are Leishmaniasis. A disease that affects millions of people every year with almost 12 million people affected today. Leishmaniasis kills roughly 20,000 - 50,000 yearly. Current treatments has various side effects and are not always effective.
In September 2011 the University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia started a project that ran on the World Community Grid in search for a better drug against this disease. The project ran for almost 2 years straight, collecting 37 150 years of results!
On 8th of September 2016 there was a paper released; it had some great news based on this very projects results. There may be a potential to new drugs for this disease. The results was posted in Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design by Dr. Carlos Muskus López.
From the screening of 600,000 molecules trough the volunteering platform, searching for proteins that targeted the survival of parasites causing Leishmaniasis, they finally picked 10 good drug candidates for test-tube experiments. One of these showed to be able to kill these parasites without killing human cells, in vitro, with an additional of three other drugs showing promising results. Work now continues to enhance the three promising results to bring more effective and less toxic results as well.
The researchers also decided to share their entire data from the results made on the World Community Grid platform in a form of open database, letting anyone do work on searching for drugs from those results. A very open and sharing way of going.
You can read the official White Paper here
As users of Gridcoin, powered by BOINC, we can feel very proud to be able to read news like this and be a part of a platform that can improve peoples health and their way of life.
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