Distributed Computing Attacking SARS

fwc writes "D2OL has added a SARS Target to it's distributed computing project which locates potential drug candidates for several viruses. At this point, I've replaced SETI@Home at least temporarily on all of my Boxen. There are clients available for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and of course Windows."

Comments

Who owns the results?

[The Original Yama]

Who owns the results once they've been calculated? Who gets paid royalties when a drug is developed from this data? I'm not going to donate my CPU time if SARS sufferers have to pay royalties (either directly or indirectly) to GlaxoSmithcline or the US Government (which IMHO isn't any better than a multinational corporation) for their medication.

Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.

Re:Who owns the results?

[scalis]

Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.

Id love to download a client that support your open-results based medical lab developing a cure for SARS.
Sine you dont have one and there is no one else to be found I see this as the second best thing.
In my book, developing a cure that will make someone else money is better than developing no cure at all.
Please provide a link and I will switch in a clockcycle.

Computational Modeling

[gt384u]

How do all of you out there feel about contributing your computing cycles to the private sector? Previous iterations of this idea have been through nonprofit/university research institutions, but this new post seems to be private enterprise driven. As noble the goal D2OL is working towards is, i still feel odd about the whole idea. I pose the following question to the general Slashdot community: How do you feel about your computing cycles being used for the research and development of pharmaceuticals (or any other imaginable private sector application) and said company reaping tremendous profits from this show of goodwill?

Will be the drug free??

[miceliux]

If they find the correct drug against SARS, will it be free? or will it be patented and only the rich countries will use it??

on a legal matter

[thesilverbail]

Here's a question.. Suppose i download this thingummy and run it and jackpot, a miracle cure for SARS unrolls in front of my eyes. Do I have any sort of intellectual property rights over my discovery? And do I have the right to prevent the distributed software Im running from connecting back to the server and giving them the good news?
Does this mean I might win the Nobel Prize???
Not that I'm going to do anything like that. Just wondering if the guys behind the thing have thought through the legal issues.

Re:Wrong way.

[silentbozo]

Not quite. This only works for chronic diseases or conditions, where you give the people afflicted time to move their wealth and power into fixing their problem. SARS is a transient condition - a supercold if you will. Either you get it and die, or you get it and get better. Within a few weeks, you'll know either way - not enough time to bring personal resources to bear to find an actual cure, as opposed to boosting your personal immune system so you can fight the bug off by yourself. Once you're a survivor, you should have immunity, so that removes the immediate threat of re-infection, which then moves SARS to the bottom of your list of global concerns...

This may sound nasty, but ...

[halftrack]

If you're already searcing for E.T. and not a cure for cancer, why would you search for a cure for SARS? SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold. Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.

Disclaimier: I'm not saying SARS shouldn't be fought, all disease should, but let's all get some perspective.

(To back some of this up with a _little_ more reliable resource found through Google, look here)

Story link is laggy

[Anonymous Coward]

With the `slashdotting` in full effect I thought I should repost the content here.

Scientists at CDC and other laboratories have detected a previously unrecognized coronavirus in patients with SARS. While the new coronavirus is still the leading hypothesis for the cause of SARS, other viruses are still under investigation as potential causes.

Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that have a halo or crown-like (corona) appearance when viewed under a microscope. These viruses are a common cause of mild to moderate upper-respiratory illness in humans and are associated with respiratory, gastrointestinal, liver and neurologic disease in animals. Coronaviruses can survive in the environment for as long as three hours.

SARS is a respiratory illness that has recently been reported in Asia, North America, and Europe. The illness usually begins with a fever (measured temperature greater than 100.4F [>38.0C]). The fever is sometimes associated with chills or other symptoms, including headache, general feeling of discomfort, and body aches. Some people also experience mild respiratory symptoms at the outset.

After 2 to 7 days, SARS patients may develop a dry, nonproductive cough that might be accompanied by or progress to the point where insufficient oxygen is getting to the blood. In 10% to 20% of cases, patients will require mechanical ventilation.

The principal way SARS appears to be spread is through droplet transmission; namely, when someone sick with SARS coughs or sneezes droplets into the air and someone else breathes them in. It is possible that SARS can be transmitted more broadly through the air or from objects that have become contaminated.

TARGET - SARS Target 1

The new virus diverges by 50-60% from the three known groups of coronavirus. Because of the variation between coronovirus, scientists working with D2OL have selected a coronavirus protein target that has high conservation between human and animal strains. Three dimensional structure is actually more resistant to change than primary "sequence", and hence "SARS Target 1" is expected to have the same functionality and active site across all strains, and potentially allow for selection of compounds with broad activity against all coronovirus strains.

Several treatment regimens have been used for patients with SARS, but there is insufficient information at this time to determine if they have had a beneficial effect.

D2OL's target is also believed to be critical in the life cycle of the Coronovirus and drugs selected against it our expected to be viralcydal.

With your help we are testing compounds that are readily available, and credible "hits" can be tested in cell and animal models of the disease to confirm potential utility in man.

early overreaction is good

[Alomex]

When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.

Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.

This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.

Re:Pffffttt SARS - BFD

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Call me when 100,000 have died.

Um ... yeah. If you wait 'til 100,000 have died, that means millions have the disease. Odds are good that one of them is a co-worker, friend, or member of your family. Do you really want to get to that point?

The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives ...

... and there would have been people like you sitting around bitching about how this flu thing was nothing compared to other risks (especially since WW1 was going on when the epidemic started) and what a waste of time it all was.

Re:Don't all move to this!

[Idarubicin]

As a whole our society has seen millions of dollars spent on research on a disease that has only killed 295 people out of over six billion.

How many people does it have to kill before we decide that it's important?

I'm actually pleased to see millions of dollars being spent now, both on contact tracing and quarantines, and on longer term research projects. If the disease can be contained at this early stage, that's a tremendous public health success, IMHO. How much time, money, and effort could have been saved (and lost productivity avoided) if we hadn't had to deal with the bubonic plague?

After decades of effort, the World Health Organization is finally close to eradication of polio. How many billions of dollars were spent there? How many iron lungs did we buy before developing a vaccine? How many people were paralyzed? The earliest evidence of polio dates back to roughly 1500 BC--but suppose it appeared today. Let's say there were only two thousand cases--total--before medical science put out that brush fire. Perhaps twenty cases of permanent paralysis, a couple of deaths, a footnote in medical literature. People might complain that the response was 'disproportionate'. Money well spent, I think.

The problem with any new disease is that you just don't know. Far better to hit too hard than to let loose the next smallpox, Spanish flu, or pneumonic plague. If we discover that SARS has a large animal reservoir or something similar, we'll be glad that we started vaccine-related research now rather than later.

I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits.

SARS seems to kill between five and ten percent of its victims, and it can be spread through aerosolized droplets. In Ontario, most new cases are occurring among health care workers. Quite frankly, if the ambulance attendants are able to do their jobs while wearing appropriate protective equipment, good for them. Remember, they're also protecting your grandmother from the last patients to use the ambulance.

I live just outside of Toronto. Many of my friends live and work in the city--some in downtown hospitals. After an initial uproar, the average person on the street is only mildly concerned about SARS. Most are quite happy to put up with a little inconvenience now to (hopefully) avoid endemic disease later.

This is an easy decision for me

[The Tyro]

I work in Emergency Services, and have already had to deal with TWO suspected cases of SARS. Speaking as a physician, I'll donate my computing cycles, absolutely. The sooner a treatment is brought out, the better.

Here's how I feel about it: I hate having someone come into my ER when I have nothing to offer them. I feel a powerful ethical and professional obligation to take care of people, and do whatever I can for them. I do my best for each and every single patient I see, even if it's somebody who has been through maximal surgery/chemo for their cancer, and has literally reached the end of what medical science can do for them. For such folks, sometimes all I can do is hold their hand and offer a little reassurance, but at least it's SOMETHING. I hate having someone die right in front of me, and being powerless to prevent it. Call it a God complex if you want... I call it wanting to be able to help people. Having people die, and having nothing to say and no way to say it... well, that bothers me, call me crazy.

I don't particularly mind not having a cure for the common cold... a cold is an annoyance, nothing more. I very much DISLIKE not having a treatment for a lethal condition.

I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job. I don't accept Hawaii trips from them, but I'll accept lunch and a couple of pens if they're going to give me some clinically useful information (and hell, I have to write with something). I resent the AMA (I am NOT a member, BTW, for this reason and others) preaching to me about the "unethical behavior" of having dealings with drug reps. Do they really think I'm going to sell out my ethics, my oaths, and my patients because somebody took me to dinner?? I'm sorry, but that's a fucking insult.

I prescribe what I want, within the standard of care, regardless of what drug reps say. I always use cheap if I can, expensive if cheap won't work... but I like the fact that Pharmcos give me tools to take better care of patients.

The sooner a cure for SARS shows up, the happier I'll be.