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Don't turn off your PC: while you sleep, it could be fighting disease

From cancer to the common cold, hopes of finding cures now rest with a 'grid' of millions of computers

Leo Lewis
Sunday 02 February 2003 01:00 GMT
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Next time you're about to turn off the computer, stop. Just consider its vital role in the future of medical science.

Leaving the machine on overnight could mean huge leaps forward in drugs research. The cures for anthrax, breast cancer and even the common cold may be lurking in a screen saver near you. As you sleep, your PC could be joining in the effort of millions like it in offices and homes around the world – all directed towards the single task of beating disease.

The technology behind this vision is called "grid" or "organic" computing, and it is tipped as the most credible solution to the giant problem facing the pharmaceutical industry. What all companies are finding, from the smallest biotech to giants like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, is that the business of finding new drugs is getting tougher by the day.

Since the mapping of the human gen- ome, a lot of hope has been placed in the ability of our DNA to produce the answers to disease. So far, it has merely created bigger and more complex questions than anyone had previously imagined.

Drugs makers up and down the scale have found the only way to tackle that problem properly is to bombard it with as much computer processing power as possible. Screening millions of proteins against a molecule is a task that can only be contemplated now that computers are up to the job. The trouble is that such power has come at a crippling price.

For many years, expensive, lumbering "supercomputers" seemed the only answer; now the emphasis has shifted. US computer giants like IBM and United Devices, as well as big software companies like Sun, are pushing the principle that lots of small computers, linked in the right way, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

According to the technicians at IBM, the computing power of a grid grows at an exponential rate as you add more machines to it. For small drugs firms that are burning away their now limited cash on research and development, this makes a lot of sense. A report by the tech and biotech expert Forrester Research, due for publication this week, will confirm that appetite. "With budgets tightening, firms are salivating over grid computing's massive cost savings," it says.

One of those salivating chief executives is Dr Richard Palmer of the UK biotech minnow Alizyme. "A system that lets a small firm own just a small part of a large grid would allow the nimble mindset of a small biotech to compete with the might of a big drugs firm," he says.

The early stages of grid development have produced three approaches, and companies like IBM, which is straining to put itself at the centre of this revolution, are especially keen to see which one has the most success.

The first approach is the one that involves the general public, and a handful of disease-targeting schemes are about to get under way. The original attempt to harness the power of the grid came a couple of years ago in the US, where the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project realised it could analyse huge quantities of data from space if millions of home computers around the world hooked up and joined in. Now that same principle will be applied to disease. By downloading a screen saver, your computer – when you're not using it – can divert its attentions to processing genetic material for a central pot of research. On this basis, a series of new projects are about to get fully under way and their targets are anthrax, influenza and several sorts of cancer.

On the receiving end of these, universities and companies will gain far more research than current budgets allow. Oxford Glycosciences (OGS) is an early adopter of organic computing and one of its strongest proponents. "This is a good use of people's computers," says Andrew Lyall, OGS's director of proteomics. "A lot of them have connections that are on all the time, and it seems a shocking waste not to use all that processing power."

The British government has also been persuaded of the possibilities of grid computing and recently joined IBM and Oxford University in a £4m breast cancer screening project called "eDiamond".

The second approach takes the idea one stage further. While getting the public involved could draw on many thousands of machines, some biotech firms are targeting any business after closing time.

The emerging idea is that drugs researchers would be able to buy processing time from offices and other organisations that would otherwise be allowing their machines to stand idle. Patrick Banks, finance director of the UK biotech Inpharmatica, says: "We have certainly looked into a system that would let us buy the downtime processing power of another, larger company cheaply. Take a big firm like Marks & Spencer: when they all go home, the computers are effectively being wasted. Making them available for processing big batches of genetic information makes a lot of commercial sense."

But IBM, which sees the grid as a big source of future revenues, is most interested in the third approach: using the technology to link companies together. Last week, it launched a drive to convert businesses to grid computing. The main thrust was on life sciences, but the aero- space and financial services industries were also on Big Blue's list of targets.

Dr Daron Green, IBM's director of grid development, says: "When it gets really interesting is where you have two companies with both complementary skills and a load of spare capacity. For the first time, you really have the opportunity to put a large number of small companies together and have them competing with the very largest players in their sector."

That vision is becoming a reality in the US, and the traditional pharmaceutical giants are growing nervous. The North Carolina Bioinformatics Grid, a collaboration of more than 60 university departments and biotech firms, is the first of its kind but UK sources believe a British equivalent is "only weeks away".

If grid computing does start getting results in the way that IBM and others hope, big pharma has a problem. Not only will its own drug-discovery methods be further exposed as ineffective, but companies will not be able just to swoop down on little firms and buy their discoveries. The new cures for colds, anthrax and other diseases will be the property of the grid.

Equally concerning for the big players is that this may not be a bandwagon they can jump on easily. As Dr Green says: "The grid is about changing the whole culture, and those companies are not good at changing their cultures."

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