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Crowdsourcing HIV Research

Posted by timothy on from the work-backwards-to-zero dept.

biolgeek writes "In recent years, HIV has been managed with a collection of therapies. However, the virus will likely evolve around these drugs, making it crucially important to get a better understanding of the virus itself. An important step in understanding the virus is to get a handle on its genetic blueprint. William Dampier of Drexler University is taking a novel approach to this research by crowdsourcing his problem. He is hosting a bioinformatics competition, which requires contestants to find markers in the HIV sequence that predict a change in the severity of the infection (as measured by viral load). So far the best entry comes from Fontanelles, an HIV research group, which has been able to predict a change in viral load with 66% accuracy."

6 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow, I would love to get involved with this and help find the cure for AIDS. Unfortunately I don't really have the expertise to do ANYTHING related to it, and I'm not sure many do.

    I'm not sure you can call it crowdsourcing when the number of people who can get involved are so small. Maybe a contest or an open research project or something. Either way, I wish them luck.

    --
    Qxe4
    1. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I'm not convinced you NEED any knowneldge of AIDS. At the end of the day, it's just a data mining problem.

    2. Re:Wow by tignet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Now that you mention it, all research requires fuel that, at some level, produces cancer-causing emissions. All research should be stopped! We've known about this for a long time, why produce all those cancer-causing emissions looking for 'better' treatments?

      Although, I suggest that instead of sending HLT instructions to the processors as part of the idle loop, you should turn your computer off when it's idle. Think about all the energy you're using; the cancer-causing emissions are too much to bear. Wait! Go check the electricity meter on your house! Your entire house is burning energy even while you sleep. Oh no! We should all go completely off the grid and stop all research. That's definitely the best way of fighting cancer.

      While it's interesting that you "find this kind of stuff amazingly ironic," you may want to keep that irony and associated comments to yourself in the future. You may think your opinion is insightful or particularly interesting, but, to me, the following quote comes to mind:

      'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln

  2. Lowest bidder ... by DeadDecoy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    They're really going for the lowest bidder if they want to crowd source this problem:

    There is $USD500 up for grabs, and the winner(s) will also have the opportunity to co-author a paper with the competition host. The winner must supply their methodology before any prize money is awarded.

    $500 amounts to around a week or so worth of work, not counting resources used like hardware and computing time. And also, the prize is you get to be a coauthor? If you develop a novel algorithm that has a statistically significant improvement over prior methods, you should damn well be the first author with the host being the coauthor. A more interesting crowd-sourced competition should involve a >$100k prize with a publication in some significant journal like nature, bioinformatics, or new england journal. That would at least attract the hardcore statisticians to your cause.

  3. Re:Olde School HIV cure crowdsourcing... by Saishuuheiki · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was under the impression that some African countries are more or less doing this with little to no success in gaining immunity.

  4. Re:Olde School HIV cure crowdsourcing... by the_humeister · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or just produce people with the CCR5-32 gene variant.