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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."
Just wondering. Is there a "prize?" Like getting the first dose of whatever-it-turns-into?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Hint: Not the player.
He gets the #1 high score.
Top protein names are "ASS" and "POO"
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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.