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Foldit Player May Have Created a Useful Protein
An anonymous reader writes "The organizers of the game Foldit, where you fold proteins for scientific research, announced that a user has found a protein that may be able to bind influenza viruses. Researchers plan to test the protein in a lab over the next few weeks to see if it might be medically useful."
And who gets the patent(s), money etc. for this particular protein?
Just wondering. Is there a "prize?" Like getting the first dose of whatever-it-turns-into?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I don't give a rat's ass whether I have to pay the player or the company, so long as I have to pay someone. And I do.
Isn't this how the premise for I am legend came about?
Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a d
If it is a useful protein, the patent will go to whoever owns the lab. The player and discoverer will be quietly shooed away. You'll see a slashdot article titled "foldit player sues lab" in 8 months. Then you'll never hear about it again.
I heard about this when it was first announced and cannot believe it still exists/people are still playing this "game"
Anyway this is probably more of a PR smoke then an actual discovery. Drug companies burn through lots of computer time to find potential drug targets most of which do not work. I would expect that a protein (much larger and more complicated then developed drugs) would make the likelihood of its synthesis and folding into the desired structure even less likely to work.
Influenza is a fickle virus, able to alter its hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins very quickly. Although the link is very light on details, it sounds like they're hoping for a hemagglutinin-binding protein. While this would be a "proof of concept" for the usefulness of Foldit, don't hold your breath on this being any sort of flu cure.
Surely it is amazing that this is the first time?
With the number of people contributing to Folding@Home etc I would have thought that something like this would have happened long ago.
FoldIT is not only closed source software, but also closed as an application. It's the best application to remodel and fix up protein structures out there; yet it is not available to use it on your own protein structures.
The groups behind it are research groups and of course with it being their own 'product' they are not forced to sell it or give it away, but they are still sitting on it, although many molecular biologists could benefit from its availability as a professional remodeling tool. When emailing the developing group about possibilites to use it for redesigning parts of my own protein structure and paying for the program, I was only told that there are no plans to allow that. In my opinion this is bad science, because there is no way to duplicate any of it, without a massive development effort.
I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter , he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.
Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hard problem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.
so it's a completely different pool of money[,] asstard.
You're confused about that making any difference at all in a cost-benefit to society way.
To paraphrase you: "You're so stupid. The money doesn't get wasted in this place but in the other one. This is totally ok, you know, because this is a symptom of the way the system is set up, so it must be ok. That said, I'm now going to drag something completely unrelated into the discussion because I'm less interested in finding out what's right than in attacking people who don't share my unquestionable presuppositions."
The difference here probably is that your parent implied it's bad to spend money, i.e. human time and labor investment, on something that doesn't create added value, while you think it's just "frictional" costs in a system that can't be any other way.
... and their username isn't sexkitten69.
Be seeing you...
The research was probably touched by his noodly appendage.
The funniest part is people assuming this will end up being a cure. Big Pharma has no interest in cures, just mildly effective maintenance drugs one has to keep purchasing in perpetuity.
I'll bet you assume that Obamacare will make this better
Okay, Internet. Listen up. From now on, the first person to use "Obama" or any term containing "Obama" in an argument loses.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Does that make you the official Obama nazi?
Urgh
Go look at the literature. Pauling showed that the mechanism virii use to transport glucose also transport C and that very high doses of C (100G/d IV) kill virii and do not harm the patient.
This represented a significant threat to big pharma who then spent the rest of his life "discrediting" him by doing stupid shit like giving *oral* doses of C, finding it didn't work they calling him a quack.
You'll notice, if you look hard enough they were able to reverse polio in the 50s with this technique that supposedly works on *any* virus.
Don't even mention quackwatch.com - it's funded by big pharma.
Pauling is the only guy that ever got two nobel prizes in two different areas unshared.
Don't believe me, go look at what he did and the troubles he had and follow the money.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Anyone using Obama for support, loses.
If you want to win, better 'hope' he doesn't 'volunteer' to support you.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
If you don't want to play the game but do want to help protein research then there are a couple of ways you can donate some of your unused computer time to researchers in this field. The newest way about to come on-line is a project by Dr. Charlie Strauss at Los Alamos National Lab. He is in the process of setting up a distributed grid of volunteer computers from folks who want to donate cycles on their (intel) mac computers to protein design. It's not online yet but you already have the software installed on your mac. it's part of the mac-OS and it's called xgrid and it's in your sharing preferences. If you have a mac, with a multi-core intel CPU and want to donate some of your underutilized computing power then write to him at cems (at) lanl.gov with the subject line "Joining the Xgrid" for details. He's working on replacements for antibodies and enzymes that can digest wood waste into bio-fuels.
If you have never heard of Xgrid, it's a descendant of the ZILLA project that ran on NeXT computers. One of the earliest volunteer grids. Zilla is credited with pivotal exploration of the 4 color map theorem proof and foundational work in big-computing CGI.
Virii: A word used to indicate ignorance about viruses.
Ok it's not, but that should be the definition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... they've only got maybe a decade and a bit left on the patent to make as much money as possible ... How much more do you think a cure for influenza is worth than a "mildly effective maintenance drug"
Additionally: Curing a diseased person means there's a disease-prone person able to earn money and buy their other products for decades to come - and a doctor who knows they sell stuff that works well.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
protein folding is NP-Hard, unfortunately it's still crap for predicting actual protein structure at a level useful for creating new drugs.