IBM World Community Grid collabore à la recherche d’un traitement contre le cancer chez les enfants

Paris - 17 mars 2009:

IBM et les chercheurs du Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute et de l’université de Chiba au Japon ont lancé un nouveau projet utilisant le World Community Grid(1) pour la mise au point d’un traitement contre le neuroblastome - tumeur maligne qui représente la cause principale de mortalité chez les enfants souffrant de cancer. En utilisant le World Community Grid, le Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute accélère la recherche en accédant à l’un des plus puissants supercalculateurs virtuels au monde afin d’identifier le meilleur traitement parmi les 3 millions de médicaments potentiels. Le centre estime pouvoir achever ce projet en deux ans, alors que sans le World Community Grid l’ensemble de ces calculs aurait duré une centaine d’années.
 
(1) permet l’utilisation de la puissance de calcul d’ordinateurs personnels, dispersés dans le monde, quand ils ne sont pas utilisés par leur propriétaire

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IBM World Community Grid to Search for Cure for Childhood Cancer

TOKYO, Japan, March 17, 2009 . . . IBM and researchers from the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University in Japan are launching a new World Community Grid project to discover a drug treatment for neuroblastoma, the most common cause of death in children with solid tumors. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in children.

The cause of neuroblastoma is unknown, but most physicians believe that it is an accidental cell growth that occurs during normal development of the sympathetic ganglia and adrenal glands.  It occurs most often the first two years of a child’s life, and has a high risk for disease relapse with survival rates less than 40 percent.

The rapid advancement of genetic research at Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute holds great promise for treating neuroblastoma. The new Help Fight Childhood Cancer project uses the idle computational power from volunteer’s computers to identify which of the three million potential drug candidates prohibit growth of three proteins believed to be key in the progression of the cancer.  This project could help build smarter health systems by delivering better drug treatments that could empower individuals to customize or target their therapies and treatment plans.

“Our promising research will be further advanced by the free computing power we will use from World Community Grid,” said Dr. Akira Nakagawara, the principal investigator at the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute.  “It would take us about 100 years using our own computing resources to make progress, but with access to one of the world largest virtual supercomputers, we estimate to complete this project in 2 years, and begin laboratory trials.”

Dr. Nakagawara recently earned the Princess Takamatsu Cancer Research Fund Prize 2008 for his neuroblastoma research.  In his work, he discovered that one protein, TrkB, is expressed at high levels in aggressive neuroblastomas, and enhances the tumor cell’s growth.  World Community Grid will conduct complex chemistry simulations of the drug candidates to see which ones bond to TrkB, ALK and SCxx, so that those can be tested further in the laboratory.  All results will be made available to the general scientific community to advance the field of cancer biology and drug discovery.

“We have the potential to find a drug treatment for one of the most common childhood cancers in our lifetime, and it’s the volunteers who sign up to allow their computers to be used coupled with innovative grid technology that can make the difference,” said Stanley S. Litow, Vice President, IBM, Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs and President of the IBM International Foundation. “World Community Grid has been an innovative resource for researchers who have promising projects yet lack the funding and availability to the world’s largest supercomputers.”

World Community Grid is the largest public humanitarian grid in existence with more than 430,000 members who represent more than 200 countries and links to more than 1.2 million computers.  It has recently provided 250 million results, that’s just under 2 results every second. It is the volunteers that help make the difference because as each one shares their computer time, scientists are able to conduct their research faster.  For example,

·         The Nutritious Rice for the World has already returned 12 million transactions and 11,000 years of compute time.

·         The AfricanClimate@Home just completed its data collection and research analysis will now begin.

·         Help Defeat Cancer proved their more accurate technique for identifying cancer and received a $2.5 million grant from NIH to further deploy its system.

·         FightAIDS@Home has identified over 40 potential drug candidates and is proceeding with laboratory work on these.

·         Discovering Dengue Drugs Together has already identified a few potential compounds and is proceeding with laboratory work.

To become of member of World Community Grid and donate unused computer time, individuals register on www.worldcommunitygrid.org and install a free, small, secure software program onto their computers.  When computers are idle, data is requested from World Community Grid’s server.  These computers then perform the computations, and send the results back to the server, prompting it for a new piece of work.  A screen saver will tell individuals when their computers are being used.

For more information about IBM, please visit: www.ibm.com

To join World Community Grid, please visit: www.worldcommunitygrid.org

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