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