World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the immense contribution of computing power from our members, Phase 1 of the Discovering Dengue Drugs ? Together project finished on August 11, 2009.
The project launched on August 21, 2007 and ran for nearly 2 years. During that time over 159,000 members processed more than 25,500,000 results which required nearly 12,000 years of computing power from about 400,000 computers.
The project was interrupted for 17 weeks when Hurricane Ike made landfall in Galveston, Texas, USA, on September 17, 2008 and significantly damaged the research facility. Fortunately, none of the members of the research team and their families were injured and the facility was put back in working order. The project was re-started in late January, 2009.
A part of this project end, we also made some website updates. On the Research Pages and in the forums, the project is moved from Active Research to Completed Research.
Completing this project is a significant contribution to the research of Dengue Fever, Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses. This same research would have taken 205 years to complete on the computers that the researchers from UTMB had available to them in 2007.
Phase 1 was designed to serve as a comprehensive screening of approximately 3 million small "drug-like" molecules and identify several thousand molecules which attach to these virus enzymes in a manner that disables them. Molecules such as these may lead to drugs which can keep the disease from spreading in the body. The purpose of Phase 1 was to reduce the number of molecules being examined to only those that are the most promising candidates. These molecules will be further examined in Phase 2.
Phase 2 of the project will run each of the molecules identified in phase 1 through computationally demanding free energy calculations. The molecules that make it through this screening will be the candidates that show the most promising interactions with the virus enzymes and will be taken forward and further examined in the laboratory.
At this time, the researchers are busy performing post-processing on the results from Phase 1 and preparing for Phase 2. You may read about these plans and get the latest update from Dr. Stan Watowich in the following forum thread:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forum ... read=26616.
On behalf of the Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together research staff at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, USA, we wish to express our thanks to you for contributing your computer power to this project. With your contribution, this phase of the project was completed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.
While we wait for Phase 2 to start, we still need your help with eight (8) other ongoing projects! World Community Grid continues to run the FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2, Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2, Influenza Antiviral Drug Search, Nutritious Rice for the World, and The Clean Energy Project. All of these important projects need your computer time.
IMPORTANT: If you have elected to participate only in the Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together project, you must take some action to prevent your World Community Grid agent from sitting idle on your computer until the next phase of the project launches. Please sign in to World Community Grid, and from the "My Grid" page, select the "My Projects" link (
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ms/viewMyProjects.do) from the menu on the left. From the "My Projects" page, select one or more of the other projects in which you choose to participate or check the box labeled ?If there is no work available for my computer for the projects I have selected above, please send me work from another project? and then press ?save?.
Der ist gut! 
