Your Computer Can Help Stanford Researchers Fight The Coronavirus. Here's How | Health - ScienceAlert

If you're feeling helpless in the face of the spread of the new coronavirus around the world, here's a positive action you can take: get scientists closer to a cure in a shorter space of time by donating the time that your computer is sitting idle, says David Nield (Guest Writer) at ScienceAlert.

Photo: Alissa Eckert/MS/Dan Higgins/MAM/CDC

By installing a small program on your laptop or desktop at home, which runs in the background when you're not doing anything else on the computer, you can help the experts run complex calculations to learn more about the COVID-19 disease.

The app (for both Windows and macOS) is called Folding@home and it's been developed by researchers at Stanford University – in fact this app has been helping with disease and drug research for almost 20 years now.

The main focus of this project is protein folding - a biological process which describes how a protein arranges its shape inside a cell. Learning more about how that process happens in particular viral proteins can in turn help to develop treatments for specific diseases...

Having this knowledge is vital for the development of drugs that could be effective against the new coronavirus, and that's something we want sooner rather than later. A bit of your computer's spare time could get us closer to this goal just a little more quickly.

"The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing life-saving drugs," says biochemist Greg Bowman, the director of Folding@home.
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Source: ScienceAlert