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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. Crowdsourcing HIV by jameskojiro · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't this what caused so many people to come down with it in the first place?

    --
    Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
  2. Olde School HIV cure crowdsourcing... by jameskojiro · · Score: 4, Funny

    Infect Huge Numbers of people with HIV and after 10 years breed the survivors and infect them again, after 100 years the crowds are dwindled down and whomever remains is immune, HIV epidemic, SOLVED!

    --
    Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
    1. 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.

    2. Re:Olde School HIV cure crowdsourcing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      We are being intensively studied. See www.zephyrfoundation.org .

  3. 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.

  4. Re:Wow by Capt.DrumkenBum · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well you could get involved with:
    http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
    and donate some processor time to FightAIDS@Home

    Just a thought.

    --
    If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?