Fighting the Zika virus with the power of supercomputing

Rutgers is taking a leading role in an IBM-sponsored World Community Grid project that will use supercomputing power to identify potential drug candidates to cure the Zika virus. The project, known as OpenZika, employs a global team of scientists who will perform "virtual" experiments in a search of treatments for the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency. OpenZika will screen current drugs and millions of drug-like compounds from existing databases against models of Zika protein structures (and also against structures of proteins from related viruses, including West Nile Virus and Dengue). These computational results will be shared quickly with the research community and general public, with compounds showing the most promise then tested in laboratory settings. "Instead of having to wait a number of years, even decades potentially, to test all these compounds in order to find a few that could form the basis of antiviral drugs to cure Zika, we will perform these initial tests in a matter of months, just by using idle computing power that would otherwise go to waste," says Alex Perryman, a research teaching specialist at Rutgers' New Jersey Medical School, in Professor Joel Freundlich's lab.