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Foldit Player May Have Created a Useful Protein

Posted by kdawson on from the know-when-to-hold-'em dept.

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."

26 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. And who gets the patent for it? by MartinSchou · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And who gets the patent(s), money etc. for this particular protein?

    1. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hint: Not the player.

    2. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by blue+trane · · Score: 3, Funny

      He gets the #1 high score.

    3. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Top protein names are "ASS" and "POO"

    4. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by glwtta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And who gets the patent(s), money etc. for this particular protein?

      I guess it's whoever spends the hundreds of millions of dollars to follow up on the infinitesimal chance that this will lead to something useful?

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    5. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      research isn't that expensive.

      When are people going to realize that pharmaceutical and medical research isn't that expensive?

      it's infinitely more complicated than most things, but we wouldn't have the industries we have today if they were magically prohibitively expensive.

    6. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 3, Informative

      it's not expensive to run one trial.

      it's expensive to run lots of trials. Spread that cost to the CDC, NIH, the WHO, various teaching hospitals, universities, pharmacos, foreign medical systems... and yes, research gets cheap per study.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    7. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by gzipped_tar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      http://fold.it/portal/node/267249

      """Foldit project was initiated with the goal of democratizing science, and we stand behind that. the process of discovery and the eventual results of game play will all be open domain.

      """

      Not sure if that claim is backed up by legal documents. The game is suspiciously vague in legal matters. No software license. No EULA. Nothing about patents.

      Or perhaps there is, but not released to the public.

      --
      Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
    8. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by Kitkoan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it's not expensive to run one trial.

      it's expensive to run lots of trials. Spread that cost to the CDC, NIH, the WHO, various teaching hospitals, universities, pharmacos, foreign medical systems... and yes, research gets cheap per study.

      Problem is, the companies spend even more money on ads then medical R&D.

      --
      Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
    9. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by glwtta · · Score: 4, Informative

      Research isn't, research and development is. (research can be pretty expensive, too).

      And we do have exactly the industry that we do - that is, everybody chasing blockbusters, the glut of "me-too" drugs, the paltry number of drugs actually making it to market - because it is prohibitively expensive.

      The current model seems to be for giant pharma companies to more or less indiscriminately buy up small biotechs, hoping to randomly strike gold with one of them. This does not lead to a very efficient system: I think we are up to $100+ billion spent on research annually ($70B from industry, $30B from the NIH) for a grand total of 26 new drugs approved last year.

      So yeah, 'prohibitively' is exactly the right word.

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    10. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by glwtta · · Score: 3, Informative

      Spread that cost to the CDC, NIH, the WHO, various teaching hospitals, universities, pharmacos, foreign medical systems... and yes, research gets cheap per study.

      The CDC and WHO don't fund any significant amount of research (and even if they did, the CDC budget is only something like $8 billion, WHO is under a billion), the NIH is supposed to primarily support basic research, not development (not to mention funding those universities you mentioned).

      Look, it's a fairly complex industry, fixing it isn't quite as simple as "let's everyone pitch in now!".

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    11. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by tehcyder · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Problem is, the companies spend even more money on ads then medical R&D.

      That is the reality of capitalism, so depending on your point of view it's either a necessary evil, or another reason to have some sort of socialist planned economy (at least in some areas).

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    12. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by Arancaytar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Someone in the industry told me that it consists of immense up-front investments before a new drug is approved, which may then pay of tenfold in the remaining years until the patent runs out - or turn out to be a complete loss, if the studies are inconclusive or the substance is not safe in humans.

      Supposedly it's like playing poker with the company deciding to invest hundreds of millions more or abandon the research they've done so far.

      (Which doesn't include the money the company loses on lawsuits if they *really* fuck it up. TeGenero went bust the same year after their ill-fated TGN1412 study, and Bayer needed years to recover from the Lipobay disaster.)

    13. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by jmv · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Try comparing R&D expenses to their marketing expenses. R&D doesn't look that expensive anymore.

      --
      Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
    14. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by Trepidity · · Score: 2, Informative

      Partly yes, but partly for the opposite reason as well: lots of entities makes it possible to play shell games. There are a lot of biochem profs who have biotech companies on the side, and you might not be surprised that what often happens is that 90% of the research is done in academia on grant funding, and then the last 10% migrates to their startup, which patents the result.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    15. Re:And who gets the patent for it? by tthomas48 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Huh, oddly enough I seem to remember that when drug companies were banned from advertising on TV their drugs still sold. So it's not really a necessary evil. Drug companies used to be hugely profitable and didn't have as large marketing budgets.

  2. So... what's the user win? by Shag · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just wondering. Is there a "prize?" Like getting the first dose of whatever-it-turns-into?

    --
    Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    1. Re:So... what's the user win? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Coincidentally, that's also the punishment for the loser.

    2. Re:So... what's the user win? by Onymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Foldit has given out prizes.

      This blog entry shows a 3D-printed protein.

      They should probably also look into these.

  3. Re:*sigh* by Garble+Snarky · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So... you're saying the work of studying proteins for years, coming up with the game idea, creating and distributing the software, is all nothing, in comparison to the guy who downloaded a program and clicked some buttons? I think the notion of "discovery" is pretty fuzzy in a lot of cases, but you're crazy if you think the player deserves MORE credit than the software authors here.

  4. Re:*sigh* by sFurbo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or the people who synthesize the protein, test that it folds the right way, test it in vitro, test it in animals, perform phase 0, 1, 2 and 3 human trials. You know, the actually finding out if it can be used as a drug. Coming up with a drug candidate is the easy and cheap part of making a new drug.

  5. Some people are just very good at this by Xoc-S · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:confusion about problems and symptoms by complacence · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. hope they name it after him/her... by Nyder · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... and their username isn't sexkitten69.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  8. Re:Pauling and Vitamin C by Darth+Hamsy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Go look at the literature. Pauling showed that the mechanism virii use

    Viruses, viruses, viruses. Virii is not the plural of virus.

  9. Re:FoldIT? Open IT! by goombah99 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The source code for the scientific part of it is freely available from RosettaCommons.org for academic use.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.