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Biotech Science

Distributed Computing Attacking SARS 334

Posted by timothy from the not-just-sequencing dept.
fwc writes "D2OL has added a SARS Target to it's distributed computing project which locates potential drug candidates for several viruses. At this point, I've replaced SETI@Home at least temporarily on all of my Boxen. There are clients available for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and of course Windows."
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Distributed Computing Attacking SARS More

Distributed Computing Attacking SARS

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  • a very worthy goal! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DataDevil ( 1762 )
    Looks more usefull then finding the odd alien out there :P
    • Especially for those of us who don't think any can be found.

    • Re:a very worthy goal! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not if the alien has the cure!
    • Looks more usefull then finding the odd alien out there :P

      Now if they could come up with a Distributed Computing Project to help with a socially dibilitating disease affecting millions of geeks and /.ers called CIC.

      Chronic Invoulntary Celebacy.
    • Well, I don't think slashdotting their server is going to help them find the cure to SARS any quicker...

  • Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChaosMagic ( 657047 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:22AM (#5818410)
    If everyone stops doing SETI@home and moves to battling the SARS problem then we may miss a vital signal from outer space from an alien race that has a cure to SARS and all the other nasties roaming this planet!
    • ...then they'll enslave us and make chickens grow out of our arses. It's true! It happened to a friend of a friend's uncle's niece!

    • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:34AM (#5818436)
      Except that seti@home does not analyse signals in real time, they've got a huge evergrowing database of signals recieved and we're analyzing that... we aren't going to miss a signal, we're just going to find it few hours later.

      AFAIK.

    • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Informative)

      by aarondyck ( 415387 ) <aaron&ufie,org> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:43AM (#5818455) Homepage Journal
      Actually, the way SETI works allows for any workload over an extended period of time. The samples that your computer is analysing have been around for quite some time; they are transmitted from regions that are light years away! In addition, it is only once every year or so that they have a real chance to look for anything interesting that they find. As far as a cure for SARS goes, I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits. She has since been released, quite possibly too early (they still don't know what was wrong with her), so I'm anxious for the world to just deal with SARS. This is a prime example of the Fear Consumption Model [bowlingforcolumbine.com] brought to us by Marilyn Manson [marilynmanson.com] and Michael Moore [michaelmoore.com]. The more we fear, the more we consume. As a whole our society has seen millions of dollars spent on research on a disease that has only killed 295 people out of over six billion. When diseases were feared in the past it was worth fearing them: Justinian's Plague (541-544AD) killed 40% of the population of Constantinople; In the 14th Century we saw as many as 800 people a day dying of the Bubonic Plague -- 30% of Normandy's population was decimated. By comparison, SARS has managed to destroy less than 0.0000005% of the world's population, infecting a mere 0.000077% of the population.

      • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:12AM (#5818501) Journal
        While much of the public fears of SARS is definitely overplayed in the short term, in the long term there is a justifiable fear of the risks posed by a fast-spreading, lethal, and poorly understood pathogen. Especially one that coincides with the cold and flu season (thus masking the symptoms of a more severe disease), and may share similar traits in terms of easy transmission via airborne droplets. Remember, highly infectious pathogens are much more dangerous to the world population than they were prior to the jet age (think Ebola...)

        • Ebola is pretty hard to catch (Score:5, Informative)

          by The Tyro ( 247333 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @09:35AM (#5819010)
          Ebola usually requires some kind of bodily fluid/tissues swap with an infected person.

          There's also a reason why "hemorrhagic fever" bugs like Ebola tend to burn themselves out... they are extraordinarily lethal, and quickly kill their host; Ebola has a 90% mortality (compared to 6-12% for SARS). When a virus is too hard on its host, it lessens the opportunity to spread itself.

          AIDS is a good example of a successful high-mortality bug... but you can stay alive and asymptomatic for so very long, that spread is virtually assured if you are uncautious.

          SARS looks so much like the common cold, that even experienced clinicians have difficulty differentiating it from other bugs. That is, of course, until it's too late. SARS could be a real problem... significant mortality rate, easy to spread, poorly understood, and, like West Nile, NO treatment (well, some advocate treating West Nile with interferons... but the side effects of those drugs are terribly unpleasant; the treatment is almost worse than the disease).

          It's nice that they're taking this thing seriously; any money spent on containment is probably well-spent indeed. If they can determine that this bug has no animal reservoir, it could even be eradicated. Till then, public panic serves no one, but public caution is NOT a bad thing.

      • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:43AM (#5818550) Homepage
        When diseases were feared in the past it was worth fearing them: Justinian's Plague (541-544AD) killed 40% of the population of Constantinople;
        [...]

        If we had lived in that time, SARS would probably have killed a similar percentage of the population. Nowadays we have modern concepts of hygiene, we know what bacteria and viruses are, etc. so we know how to contain epidemics. That doesn't mean that the disease is any less worth of fear. It's that fear that motivated humanity to get to this level of medical knowledge in the first place.

        • It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40% (and that's not even necessarily the case; a lot of people that have recovered just recovered on their own, similarly to how you recover from a cold, not due to wonder

          • Re:probably not likely (Score:5, Informative)

            by Dionysus ( 12737 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @07:43AM (#5818647) Homepage
            I saw a report yesterday, either BBC or CNN, that WHO now believes the fatality rate of SARS will be about 10-15%. Much higher than previously believed (this was after China went public with their info)

          • Re:probably not likely (Score:5, Informative)

            by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @02:39PM (#5820427)
            It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40%

            The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 4% which is similar to what we're seeing with SARS. It infected a fifth of the world's population. The U.S. was one of the countries least devastated by the pandemic. But even here 20,000,000 Americans came down with the flu, with 850,000 deaths resulting. Which means that flu killed more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.

            Like SARS, this one originated in China as well. It started as a virus passed from birds to pigs. (They know because in 1997 someone exhumed the body of a soldier who died of it in 1918 and sequenced some of the virus from his lungs.)

        • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27, 2003 @07:15AM (#5818601)
          Nowadays we have modern concepts of hygiene,

          You're talking to a crowd fascinated with moist towelettes [slashdot.org] here...

      • Not really (Score:4, Insightful)

        by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @07:30AM (#5818622) Homepage Journal
        You know how easy it is to catch a cold right? Well, SARS is like that, a cold. It's easy to catch. There's a damn good reason for all this hype. No one talked about SARS in china for months until it went totally out of control and people didn't realize that they should be taking basic precautions.

        SARS would have absolutely no problem killing the same numbers of people if it managed to get 'free' of the quarantines and stuff

        Also, Michael Mooor is a dumbass, and he has his math backwards. The more scared we are, the less we consume. SARS is death to tourism and the like in Asia, and it makes people stay home to avoid it.

        9/11 certanly didn't boost the economy.
      • SARS has a mortality rate of more than 10% so far in Singapore.

        In the past century, there has not been any other infectious disease that has spread so fast and consumed medical and political resources of affected countries so fast.

        Just because your country has not been significantly affected (so far) does not mean that this is a minor problem.

        It's still early in the progression of SARS. If there are no good public health measures to limit the spread of SARS, it's entirely conceivable that the entire worl

      • Re:Don't all move to this! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @10:59AM (#5819401) Journal
        As a whole our society has seen millions of dollars spent on research on a disease that has only killed 295 people out of over six billion.

        How many people does it have to kill before we decide that it's important?

        I'm actually pleased to see millions of dollars being spent now, both on contact tracing and quarantines, and on longer term research projects. If the disease can be contained at this early stage, that's a tremendous public health success, IMHO. How much time, money, and effort could have been saved (and lost productivity avoided) if we hadn't had to deal with the bubonic plague?

        After decades of effort, the World Health Organization is finally close to eradication of polio. How many billions of dollars were spent there? How many iron lungs did we buy before developing a vaccine? How many people were paralyzed? The earliest evidence of polio dates back to roughly 1500 BC--but suppose it appeared today. Let's say there were only two thousand cases--total--before medical science put out that brush fire. Perhaps twenty cases of permanent paralysis, a couple of deaths, a footnote in medical literature. People might complain that the response was 'disproportionate'. Money well spent, I think.

        The problem with any new disease is that you just don't know. Far better to hit too hard than to let loose the next smallpox, Spanish flu, or pneumonic plague. If we discover that SARS has a large animal reservoir or something similar, we'll be glad that we started vaccine-related research now rather than later.

        I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits.

        SARS seems to kill between five and ten percent of its victims, and it can be spread through aerosolized droplets. In Ontario, most new cases are occurring among health care workers. Quite frankly, if the ambulance attendants are able to do their jobs while wearing appropriate protective equipment, good for them. Remember, they're also protecting your grandmother from the last patients to use the ambulance.

        I live just outside of Toronto. Many of my friends live and work in the city--some in downtown hospitals. After an initial uproar, the average person on the street is only mildly concerned about SARS. Most are quite happy to put up with a little inconvenience now to (hopefully) avoid endemic disease later.

  • Good idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Daath ( 225404 ) <lpNO@SPAMcoder.dk> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:22AM (#5818411) Homepage Journal
    I wonder when my United Devices client (ud.com [ud.com]) is gonna add that project... It's currently working on smallpox and cancer...

    Should I change projects? Switch UD in favor of D2OL or what? And why? ;)
    • I've heard you can run it under wine but can't be bothered messing with it.
      • Yeah, no kidding! I find that extremely frustrating, because I have a Linux web server running 24 hours/7 days here at home, and it could easily be crunching some data for UD while it sits, mostly idle.

        Those of us, like myself, who have EasyNews subscriptions, like to use the UD client because it lets you earn gigs. of download credit for every X number of days of processing you do.

    • Re:Good idea (Score:2, Informative)

      by rich_r ( 655226 )
      At risk of sounding ignorant, isn't smallpox well and truly beaten? (Apart from the lab samples?)

  • Who owns the results? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Original Yama ( 454111 ) <lists.sridhar@dhanapala n . c om> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:22AM (#5818412) Homepage
    Who owns the results once they've been calculated? Who gets paid royalties when a drug is developed from this data? I'm not going to donate my CPU time if SARS sufferers have to pay royalties (either directly or indirectly) to GlaxoSmithcline or the US Government (which IMHO isn't any better than a multinational corporation) for their medication.

    Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.

    • Re:Who owns the results? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by scalis ( 594038 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:47AM (#5818466) Homepage
      Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.

      Id love to download a client that support your open-results based medical lab developing a cure for SARS.
      Sine you dont have one and there is no one else to be found I see this as the second best thing.
      In my book, developing a cure that will make someone else money is better than developing no cure at all.
      Please provide a link and I will switch in a clockcycle.

      • So you know for a fact that the results will not be in the open and free for use?

        Can you please elaborate (or provide a link) - it would be great to know a little more about what they will actually do with the information.

        I completely share the views of Yama on this one - vaccines/cures for this kind of diseases would be nice to have, but we are not (yet) facing the end of civilization here... I would like to encourage other scientists and researchers to start a project where the work of the "public" wil
      • developing a cure that will make someone else money is better than developing no cure at all.

        No, it is not. If they apply for a patent and get it there won't be a cheap solution for the poor people.
        And I would be indirectly responsible for the death of that people, no matter how you apply the typical response of "Oh!, it's their government's fault not to provide its people the cure at the expense of 1/5 of their GDB"
        As additional information you can google for Manuel Patarroyo or the last events in south

        • OK, so YOU fund the R&D... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by caveat ( 26803 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @09:00AM (#5818874)
          ...last I heard, the development of a new drug costs billions of dollars. Now, it's all fine and dandy to get on your moral high horse and say that "no cure is better than an expensive cure", but at the end of the day, the money to create the drugs has to come from somewhere. So if you really believe what you're saying, I see one option - see if a VC or banker will float you a loan based on the premise that "I won't be paying you back the $1,378,422,596.83 it took to research and design the drug because it just isn't important, don't you see that poor people need these drugs more than you need your money back?" If you do find somebody who'll do that, let me know, I could use some free money too..

          Not that pharmcos won't do some pretty low things, but really, with the expenses we're talking about, basic economics can explain a whole lot of it.
          • What if governments payed for the research? Finding treatments and preventions for diseases seems like it would be in the best interest of a nation. Alas, helping people does not seem to be on the agenda of many governments or the pharm. co.'s.
            It does cost the companies a lot of money to make the new drugs, but they easily make that money back and then some through defending patents that keep the price of the drug artificially high, even after the research is payed off. Pharmcos are a two sided coin


        • Why do you care about the poor people? Care about yourself first.

          I'd rather see the third world die than die myself. Consider the fact that its run this software or risk having no cure at all, you need to shut up.

      • Re:Who owns the results? (Score:4, Informative)

        by mike3411 ( 558976 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @02:51PM (#5820471) Homepage
        Check out http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]. They aren't researching SARS, but other, IMHO more important problems such as Altzheimer's, BSE (mad cow disease) and general protein research. Also, since it's run by a university, their data is public domain (although they'll probably take credit for your CPU cycles ;) ). Go fold!
    • So, would you rather have the cure available for some price, or do your level best to avoid helping find a cure?

      I guess with the latter, you can preserve your snobbish self-righteousness that you aren't helping a corporation who might need to offset some costs.

      Just tell yourself the world will thank you later.
    • If your computer helps to produce the result and they make billions off the result, I'm sure at least one atty will be willing to help you collect some of that. Of course the drug compaines will have more better paid lawyers but if you helped to provide the IP and there isn't a contract, there will be issues.

      However I expect what is going on here is that they are looking for existing drugs that will work. They have the IP on those existing drugs.

      A program called Partek [partek.com] is used by other compaines to sear
    • You can argue patents all you want but in order for the pharmaceutical industry to function the intellectual property right of drug research companies most be sacrosanct. Billions of dollars are spent every year on pharmaceutical research and if the is no return on investment then there won't be billions of dollars to spend next year. I realize that there are government grants but that is not were most of the money to fund research comes from most if it comes from the money made from the previous successful


    • You are fucking stupid, When you get Sars I'm going to laugh at you.

  • Ain't there yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by ericwb ( 126929 ) <eric.broneerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:23AM (#5818414)
    Unfortunately, finding a target binding site for a potential drug is years away from actually having a useful cure...

    • Re:Ain't there yet (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Muhammar ( 659468 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @08:32AM (#5818777)
      Biologists have to find target. Produce the protein artificialy, study it and validate it (=conclusive evidence that blocking it will blocks the virus). Ten they have to develop a reliable high-throughput assay and huge collections of chemicals are screened to see if there is any decent inhibitor found. Chemists select the most reasonable candidates and start elaborating them (=derivatomania). Once they get very potent inhibitors, they do a lot of other optimisation - to get drug candidate that is cell-permeable cells, not metabolized/excreeted too fast, has low protein binding and good distribution, is not toxic and is preferably oraly available. At this point a lot of detailed biology research has to be done in animals, which is slow. Then there is study on healthy volunteers (subject of government aproval), then pilot clinic study just to see if they can get decent dosing in patients, then second large double-blind clinical study to see efficiency and the third phase even larger study to compare the drug with other therapies. Human trials are extremely costly.

      Pre-clinical development can take several years, as it was case with AIDS, clinical trials 4-6 years. It goes this fast only if there is a big profit potencial(to justify $400M cost of development), which so far there is not.

      Government now tests a collection of *all* known approved drugs (concidered reasonably safe) to see if any of them has any effect. If we get lucky on this - slim chances - it would cut the development time and the clinical testing too, since only 1-2 studies would be needed.

  • Wrong way. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark@@@seventhcycle...net> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:26AM (#5818422) Homepage
    We're going at this all the wrong way...

    I know how to cure SARS.

    You give 8 of the most powerful businessmen in America SARS.

    In two months, there will be 3 or 4 different cures.

    • Did he just threaten Steve Jobs! How Dare he!

      • Re:Wrong way. (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Did he just threaten Steve Jobs! How Dare he!

        Well I don't know about Steve Jobs, but he just threatened Dubbya. Good on him!
      • You give 8 of the most powerful businessmen in America SARS.

        Did he just threaten Steve Jobs! How Dare he!

        If you think Steve Jobs is one of the eight most powerful businessmen in America, then you've been reading Slashdot too long. Go outside and buy a newspaper. Now.

        Most of the most powerful businessmen are part of--or advising--the GWB cabinet.

    • Re:Wrong way. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:21AM (#5818517) Journal
      Not quite. This only works for chronic diseases or conditions, where you give the people afflicted time to move their wealth and power into fixing their problem. SARS is a transient condition - a supercold if you will. Either you get it and die, or you get it and get better. Within a few weeks, you'll know either way - not enough time to bring personal resources to bear to find an actual cure, as opposed to boosting your personal immune system so you can fight the bug off by yourself. Once you're a survivor, you should have immunity, so that removes the immediate threat of re-infection, which then moves SARS to the bottom of your list of global concerns...
    • I'd be inclined to think about this one. Just a related matter. If you look at the spread of HIV around the world, the rate is slower and the powers that be may be less inclined to 1) fund research for cures or vaccines, and 2) probably more importantly less inclined to distribute treatment around the world because it has less chance of affecting them. In short, it may be something like: lets cure the world before this highly infectious disease becomes a problem for us. HIV is much more manageable, we'l

    • Re:Wrong way. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Wrexen ( 151642 )
      The same way we cured the common cold! Oh, wait...
    • That might have the effect of putting more money on it, but that doesn't mean there'll be a quick cure unless it's there to be easily found.

      Michal Milken got prostate cancer ... he put money into it ... where's the cure? How much money does it take?!

  • Computational Modeling (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gt384u ( 560599 ) <gte384u@@@mail...gatech...edu> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:27AM (#5818423)
    How do all of you out there feel about contributing your computing cycles to the private sector? Previous iterations of this idea have been through nonprofit/university research institutions, but this new post seems to be private enterprise driven. As noble the goal D2OL is working towards is, i still feel odd about the whole idea. I pose the following question to the general Slashdot community: How do you feel about your computing cycles being used for the research and development of pharmaceuticals (or any other imaginable private sector application) and said company reaping tremendous profits from this show of goodwill?
    • Sony has actually decided to adopt this model with the (eventually) upcoming Playstation 3. The idea is that users will leave their PS3 running all the time, game or no, and Sony will use the extra processing power to do whatever it is they do...spy on us or something. Of course, in order for this to work to their advantage we'll all have to use our PS3s to connect to the Net or some similar service. The only thing I hope is that Sony actually has an option to turn off processor sharing, just in case us

    • This is an easy decision for me (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Tyro ( 247333 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @01:06PM (#5820013)
      I work in Emergency Services, and have already had to deal with TWO suspected cases of SARS. Speaking as a physician, I'll donate my computing cycles, absolutely. The sooner a treatment is brought out, the better.

      Here's how I feel about it: I hate having someone come into my ER when I have nothing to offer them. I feel a powerful ethical and professional obligation to take care of people, and do whatever I can for them. I do my best for each and every single patient I see, even if it's somebody who has been through maximal surgery/chemo for their cancer, and has literally reached the end of what medical science can do for them. For such folks, sometimes all I can do is hold their hand and offer a little reassurance, but at least it's SOMETHING. I hate having someone die right in front of me, and being powerless to prevent it. Call it a God complex if you want... I call it wanting to be able to help people. Having people die, and having nothing to say and no way to say it... well, that bothers me, call me crazy.

      I don't particularly mind not having a cure for the common cold... a cold is an annoyance, nothing more. I very much DISLIKE not having a treatment for a lethal condition.

      I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job. I don't accept Hawaii trips from them, but I'll accept lunch and a couple of pens if they're going to give me some clinically useful information (and hell, I have to write with something). I resent the AMA (I am NOT a member, BTW, for this reason and others) preaching to me about the "unethical behavior" of having dealings with drug reps. Do they really think I'm going to sell out my ethics, my oaths, and my patients because somebody took me to dinner?? I'm sorry, but that's a fucking insult.

      I prescribe what I want, within the standard of care, regardless of what drug reps say. I always use cheap if I can, expensive if cheap won't work... but I like the fact that Pharmcos give me tools to take better care of patients.

      The sooner a cure for SARS shows up, the happier I'll be.

  • Will be the drug free?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by miceliux ( 654192 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:28AM (#5818426) Homepage
    If they find the correct drug against SARS, will it be free? or will it be patented and only the rich countries will use it??
    • I assume you volunteer your time and work in IT support for a lab full of volunteers working their butts of trying to find a cure for this and a zillion other diseases? No? You expect to be paid? So do they - and they can't get paid without patents. It's not always fair, but at least the drugs get developed this way and eventually become generic, better than a fair system with no drugs at all.

  • on a legal matter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thesilverbail ( 593897 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:36AM (#5818440) Homepage
    Here's a question.. Suppose i download this thingummy and run it and jackpot, a miracle cure for SARS unrolls in front of my eyes. Do I have any sort of intellectual property rights over my discovery? And do I have the right to prevent the distributed software Im running from connecting back to the server and giving them the good news?
    Does this mean I might win the Nobel Prize???
    Not that I'm going to do anything like that. Just wondering if the guys behind the thing have thought through the legal issues.

    • Re:on a legal matter (Score:3, Informative)

      by ericwb ( 126929 )
      There won't be any Nobel prize to win in this case. There nothing innovative about trying to find a binding target for a potential drug on the nucleic acid or one of the preoteins of a virus. It would be like rewarding "brute force" as an intelligent way of breaking code. But frankly, I don't care if we get rid of this thing intelligently or not!
    • Exactly how would that be your discovery.

      It would be a lab cliaming right over something just because you discovered it there.

      All you are doing is donating CPU time, and your only reward is the knowledge of doing a good thing (unless a particular project decides to give you more as an incentive)

      Bah some people.

  • Sounds intriguing, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lurkingrue ( 521019 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:44AM (#5818458)
    I'm not sure that this project (as it is now) will be all that useful. Alot of it appears to be hinging on generous speculation.

    I'm not a virologist, but as far as I remember, drug-directed approaches haven't been notably successful with attacking coronaviruses (ever hear that "medicine can't cure the common cold", anyone?) -- and to confuse things more, this one seems to be very atypical.

    Also, from what I know about the anti-virals that have shown some efficacy against these type of SS-RNA viruses, they've been directed at nucleic acids, not at product-proteins. Ribavirin, which was initially hoped to be the "magic bullet" to stop SARS is a nucleoside analogue (purine? I don't remember). I haven't heard of an effective intervention that disrupts the protein envelope or synthesis.

    Additionally, this group is assuming that the causitive agent of SARS has correctly been isolated and identified in the first place, which isn't certain by any means.

    Aiming computing power towards a worthy goal like this can't hurt, but I question how effective it really will be. I guess the computer-types can just tweak the parameters as the biomed-folks find out more on their end.

  • SARS: DIY (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:50AM (#5818469)
    Download the SARS genetic sequence here. [bcgsc.ca]

    • Re:SARS: DIY (Score:5, Funny)

      by middle ( 628908 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @05:55AM (#5818477)
      does norton detect it?
    • One of the problems with SARS is that it mutates, and for this reason the detection test that they originally ccame up with has a lot of false negatives.

      Presumably there are some constraints on the mutation, but unless those are identified I'd have thought that any cure based on one genetic variant isn't necessarily going to be a whole lot of use. It's apparently mutating into more lethal varieties, and hence the death rate is climbing (from an initially reported 4% to a global average of 5%+ so far, but s
    • I wonder... if you emailed that to a congressman, would you be arrested as a terrorist?

  • I think this shows a need of.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wastaz ( 634441 ) <w4st4z @ n etscape.net> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:26AM (#5818524) Homepage
    This slashdotting of such a site shows the need of a new distributed computing project. I wish to propose that we all sit down and share our cpu cycles to prevent slashdotting. How about we call the project "SARS: Some people Are likely to Risk Slashdotting this project" (Ok, I know that was a lame attempt at a name, but try coming up with a better one instead of complaining :P )

    It would in essence work the way that we'd all put aside ~200k disk space and ~5k bandwidth for storing the most recently posted websites and files on our computers, then people could put together impromptu mirrors from this distributed project and behold! No more slashdottings of sites, articles and programs that one actually wants to read or download!

    So, who's with me on this trek into the land where no slashdotter has ever ventured before?
    Anyone?

  • This may sound nasty, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halftrack ( 454203 ) <jonkjeNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:35AM (#5818539) Homepage
    If you're already searcing for E.T. and not a cure for cancer, why would you search for a cure for SARS? SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold. Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.

    Disclaimier: I'm not saying SARS shouldn't be fought, all disease should, but let's all get some perspective.

    (To back some of this up with a _little_ more reliable resource found through Google, look here [inq7.net])
    • IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue

      I had no idea there were so many chimney related deaths each year!
    • the people who die from influenza are old and weak. SARS kills healthy young people, like you and me.
      • the people who die from influenza are old and weak. SARS kills healthy young people, like you and me.

        Actually, in areas with access to modern medical care (Toronto, for example) most fatalities are limited to individuals who are elderly, have other conditions, or are immune compromised. Out of twenty deaths in Canada, only two were healthy individuals under fifty.

    • The fact that it is New is exactly why it is so dangerous. The population has almost Zero natural immunity to it. This can cause massive propagation of the virus and when it spreads through under-developed regions of the planet, it will be a plague.

      If we don't throw everything we can at it now, millions of people will die. It's just that simple.

      The illness has of yet been isolated to a few regions with moderately decent health care systems in place. Imagine a small town of 200 people infected with thi

    • SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold.

      • i can avoid AIDS by wearing a condom or only having sex with one person who is not infected. ergo, it's controllable.
      • tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria, not a virus.
      • the common cold has a nice benefit: it's non-lethal.

      if you want to start comparing this to other diseases, try smallpox, plague and the spanish flu.

    • SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold.

      I'm going to set aside the common cold because it doesn't kill people. HIV does now face a massive and directed effort to study the virus and associated illness. There are probably a lot of people in public health who wish we'd jumped on that one a lot sooner.

      Tuberculosis is bacterial, but that's not particularly important to the point at hand. A vaccine tha



    • Sometimes this goes as high as 20% in places like Hong Kong, in Canada its around 15%, the 5% are fake government figures.

      SARS mortality rate/Death Rate [got.net]

      why dont you read what some actual doctors are saying. Also take into account that SARS is mutating constantly, which means its becoming more deadly everyday, the death rate is rising due to this mutation, as the virus gets smarter it learns how to more efficiently destroy our immune system.

      Do your research begore you come up with some numbers.

  • Is there a cure for... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:39AM (#5818544)
    media hype?

  • Angst hype. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @06:58AM (#5818573) Homepage
    There are much more dangerous illnesses than SARS which affect much more people. There are 2000 people sick with SARS but 40 million with AIDS. And the death rates for AIDS is 100 % percent. The numbers for cancer are even higher (not the death rates).
    This seems to be rather a angst-hyped PR champain instead of real science. The problems we have now are elsewhere.

    • Re:Angst hype. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can avoid getting AIDS, because I A) know what transmits HIV / AIDS, and B) how I can avoid AIDS.

      I can't avoid getting SARS because I A) don't know how SARS is transmitted and B) Even knowing that, I cannot easily avoid getting it if I'm in an infected area.

      I'm tired of people throwing around the 40 million number. 40 million people with AIDS, over the course of almost two decades, with a ten year incubation period. It sucks, it needs a cure, but it's had twenty years for a cure to be found. Tackle S
    • The scary thing about SARS is that unlike cancer it's contagious, and unlike AIDS there's not much you can do to avoid getting it.

      It's too early yet to be really alarmed about it (unless you live in China or Hong Kong), but history has shown that flu epidemics are nothign to be blase about.... The Spanish flu in 1918 killed ~30,000,000 people worldwide, 675,000 in the US alone (at a time when the US population was ~100M).
    • The death rate for living is 100%, too :)
    • UNAIDS sez if we (the world) spend $10 billion a year for 20 years, it will steadily decrease the number of infections. Right now, we're spending more like $1.2 billion a year, and AIDS is going crazy all over the world. Are we not spending that money because of a focus on SARS? No. We're not spending it because the countries who would be paying $5-6 billion of that are not the ones with 40% infection rates, so they simply don't care. SARS doesn't really affect that.

      On the other hand, if you read a history
    • There is a difference though. AIDS is largely spread by infected individuals performing unsafe practices that lead to infecting others.

      In a number of cases, people with AIDS are known to have been consciously trying their best to infect as many others as possible, in some sort of misguided retaliation for getting the disease.

      You're not going to be innocently standing by someone infected with the AIDS virus and catch it from them.

      While I do believe it's important to continue with AIDS research, I also ca

  • Amazing... But... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 )

    Wow. I really applaud their PR department for jumping right on this hype as quickly as possible to promote their commercial system.

    However, back here in the real world. The virus has been isolated. The virus has been sequenced. Last I checked the proteins the virus uses, and the stuctures of those proteins are still comepletely unknown. Even the class of virus is still being pinned down. They are sure it's something they haven't seen anything quite like yet.

    The absolute soonest they can turn the test

  • I can't believe the ignorance... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @07:22AM (#5818609) Homepage
    of some slashdotters commenting here. GPL'ing the successful sequence, who's gonna profit from the discovery, finding aliens is the key to eternal bliss, etc.

    First of all, SARS is a disease which still has no cure... yeah, right, same as AIDS. But, in the case of AIDS you know how to prevent it, or at the very least reduce the probability of yourself getting infected (no casual sex, sharing of blood-related equipment like syringes, etc.).

    SARS sufferers on the other hand, is not so easily detected, unless of course when they develop the symptoms... which in turn is too late if you are already in close contact with the person. Chances are, you'll be infected too. And guess what, close contact does not mean having sex with the person, you just have to share the same bus, or sit in the same train for it to spread to you.

    Wear surgical masks? Well, that will just contribute to the coffers of some surgical equipment manufacturer somewhere... As those of you in biological/medical fields most likely know that coronaviruses can still penetrate the fibres of the mask quite easily.

    I'm not looking down on research regarding other diseases, especially life-threatening ones such as AIDS, but SARS definitely needs more attention due to the nature of its speedy infection rates.

    Some argue in terms of percentage of infections of the total world population... then I ask back, how high does it need to be in order to give more attention to SARS? Some argue that the infections are happening in places far away from the US, so why bother... Are US lives more important than those from other nations? And reality check time, SARS is beginning to spread steadily in Toronto. It'll be just a matter of weeks before at least a hundred cases are reported in the US. Specifically in the Chinatown areas of major cities... Mark my words, you heard it first in this post.

    Although for the sake of humanity I hope it doesn't spread too fast... But some people seriously need a reality check right now. Tell me your standpoint on this issue then, when your parents, siblings, or loved ones are suffering from SARS, and let's see what you think about discovering aliens then.

    • Re:I can't believe the ignorance... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @11:54AM (#5819684) Journal
      And reality check time, SARS is beginning to spread steadily in Toronto.

      The number of new cases in Toronto is declining rapidly, due in part to a rapid public health response. (Epidemic curve [who.int] from the World Health Organization.)

      Specifically in the Chinatown areas of major cities...

      In Canada, most new cases were health care workers exposed at work, and strict infection control regimens have virtually stopped that mode of transmission. Travellers from affected regions of East Asia are regularly screened by health officials. There's no need to panic about SARS precisely because the public health response has been rapid and thorough. Contact tracing has worked extremely well in Canada and the United States. I would be pleased to have dinner in Chinatown in Toronto this evening.

      Absolutely we should continue to do research (and do it quickly) in case our containment measures do fail, but it is inappropriate to overstate the seriousness of the current situation.

  • early overreaction is good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @08:02AM (#5818676) Homepage
    When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.

    Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.

    This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.

  • How do you know (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CausticWindow ( 632215 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @08:30AM (#5818768)

    that all these distributed projects are actually doing what they're supposed to?

    Would you notice it if my long-lasting-no-results-yet-but-soon-for-sure distributed project for an AIDS vaccine were actually a rendering farm for animated kiddie porn movies?

  • Bioinfo view (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kaz Riprock ( 590115 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @08:59AM (#5818871)

    Just so you all know, this is about as fruitful as SETI, so don't go giving up on that just because this "sounds" like it'll be more important or yield a more relevant result. It won't. I work on this type of protein modelling and drug-protein interaction research. The state of the art is that anything produced by your client is going to be at best a wild guess at what the protein looks like or what interactions the drug will make with the protein.

    The "scoring" that your results are based on is just how nice the energy is of the final folded protein. This is flawed in a couple of ways, first it means that we need to know nearly everything about protein folding energetics and calculate it with a tidy formula (not yet...but we're getting there) and it means that the folds chosen by the algorithm to test for these energies are all the possible folds (last best guess is that we only know about 80% of all folds)...and then if you're going to try to use this for docking a drug molecule...you open a whole new can of drug-protein interaction knowledge necessary.

    SETI actually has a better scoring method for finding a "hit" and while the result (hey, look radio from space) isn't as tangible as killing a virus...I'd say stick with the SETI or try and break the XBox number....or find some more prime numbers. At this point, distributed protein folding/docking isn't just fishing in the dark, it's fishing in the dark in Death Valley.

  • SARS in Toronto, Canada (Score:4, Informative)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @09:13AM (#5818935) Homepage Journal
    World Health Organization issued a travel advisory [who.int]
    (another article [yahoo.com]
    on Yahoo.)

    To be honest with you, I have not taken the TTC (subways or buses) for a long time now so I do not know if there are many people wearing masks there, but on the streets I have only seen two people in the last month actually wearing surgical masks. On the radio (CFRB 1010) there was a discussion of a baseball game from where shots were broadcasted widely displaying a person wearing a mask, with headlines like "In Toronto, Fear Strikes Out " [washingtonpost.com]. The host from the radio was on that game and he only saw one (1) person wearing a mask out of thousands of people there. The camera-man concentrated his attention on that person.

    Have you seen the shots from Baghdad, where supposedly thousands of Iraqi people were cheering while the US Marines took down Saddams statue? Later in the news they actually showed wide shots of that scene, and it became clear there were only a handfull of people in the area.

    This is the same tactics used by the news crews for the single purpose of maintaining attention of millions of people on something that is not that newsworthy but something that can be blown out of the proportions and something that will boost news channels' ratings.

    I live in Toronto and I swear to you there is no uncontrolably spread disease here, the offices are not closing, the restaurants and hotels are not closing business is as usual, people are not staying home out of fear but there are a few thousand people on quarantine, most of which will never show any symptoms.

    Since last week there was no new cases of SARS in Toronto and the only deaths that occured (19 I think) can be attributed to SARS striking on the older people with some other health problems.

    The only thing that WHO achieved was creating massive desinformation and boosting cnn and bbc audiences for the past month and costing Toronto travel industry hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Really, last year, about 2000 people died in Toronto from flue, but we did not hear about this on cnn.

    There are over 5000000 people in Toronto area and there are about 200 people that have SARS, that is 1/50000 of 1 percent. 19 of the sick people died. So far this means about 10% mortality rate for a disease that is statistically so rare, that anyone will have better chances of been killed by a lightning bolt than getting it. Hell, there are more chances of been violently murdered somewhere in Texas than getting SARS in Toronto. Maybe WHO should post a travel advisory about that.

    • Your post demonstrates the exact misunderstanding about SARS and containment of infectious disease that has led to the current unwarranted hysteria.

      The point about SARS is not how many people it has killed relative to something like your example of murders in Texas. Murders in Texas are not particularly contagious.

      The purpose of WHO's advisories is to limit the spread of a contagious disease. It's not really targeted at individuals to tell them that they may be in danger if they go to Toronto - the po

  • /.ers should lead fight against SARS (Score:3, Funny)

    by trex44 ( 111226 ) on Sunday April 27, 2003 @09:51AM (#5819078)
    /.ers should be at the forefront in the fight againts SARS for their best interest. It's a known fact that a lot of /.ers are afflicted with SARS (Severe Absence of Romance and Sex).

    Oh, you're talking of another kind of SARS.OK, nothing anymore important here. Move on. :)

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