On April 15, 2009, the D2OL distributed computing project will officially end operations.

As this chapter in the history of The Rothberg Institute comes to a close, we wanted to take the opportunity to extend a sincere note of thanks to you, our incredibly dedicated members who have driven every aspect of this project. We also want to take a few moments to reflect on what we have accomplished and to touch on how the project's results, thanks to your committed efforts, will be leveraged by The Rothberg Institute in the future.

As most of you know, this project set out to develop a viable platform for enabling users from around the globe to use their personal computers (whether PCs, Linux or Unix boxes, etc.) to compute the interactions of small molecule drug candidates with target molecules that likely play prominent roles in specific human disease pathways, including those involved in SARS, Avian Flu, and Smallpox. In the more than seven years that the project has been active, our members have returned results for over 150 million drug candidate-disease target tasks, utilizing over 3000 years' worth of CPU time in the process!

With the computational results available to us, we turn our attention toward harvesting the best possible candidates from this data set and focusing our efforts in the laboratory in order to accomplish our original goal: finding effective real-world treatments for orphan diseases.

As we move forward, we will maintain our list of active and past members who have committed so much time and energy to this project, and we plan to update you periodically on the progress that we're making in the lab. Your efforts have been invaluable in moving us into position to take this next important step, and we truly appreciate the contributions that you have made.

We hope that you have enjoyed participating in this project as much as we have. For all that you have done, thank you!

The Rothberg Institute Staff

The Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL)™ works to discover drug candidates against Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola and SARS and other potentially devastating infectious diseases.

By simply downloading a no cost, non-intrusive software application, you can contribute the idle time available on your computer to emerging microbial diseases and other pathogens that significantly impact global health even when not connected to the Internet.

D2OL, was first to use computational methods to deploy targets against Anthrax, Smallpox and Ebola, and now is first to have a credible SARS target (A target conserved between pig and human coronovirus, the suspected virus behind SARS).

The (D2OL)™ software is downloaded to your personal computer and given drug candidates to evaluate. Once your computer receives tasks to execute, it begins a candidate evaluation process similar to finding the right key to fit into a lock. Distributed computing technology enables the process of sending hundreds of thousands of possible keys to all computing devices participating in the network. This site manages the results generated and returned to the network once you connect again to the internet. As a user, no intervention is required and the software executes as long as it is turned on, even when disconnected from the Internet.

By applying our tested platform which uniquely takes advantage of all available computing devices within its community including personal computers, servers and eventually devices like TiVo(tm) and the Xbox™, we are applying massive, cost-effective computing power to combat major health concerns and potential future threats.

Using this computing power, our proprietary methodology to identify targets (focusing on epidemiology, drugability and the target's role in the pathogen's lifecycle) and collaborating with experts in computational chemistry and structure based drug design, the (D2OL)™ initiative is working to improve our society's ability to respond to the ever increasing threats in a timely manner.

this page last reviewed April 15, 2009