WCG-Help Conquer Cancer

[UBT-mark3346]

A new project "Help Conquer Cancer" has been added

"Project Status and Findings:  

Mission
The mission of Help Conquer Cancer is to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, which helps researchers not only annotate unknown parts of the human proteome, but importantly improves their understanding of cancer initiation, progression and treatment.

Significance
In order to significantly impact the understanding of cancer and its treatment, novel therapeutic approaches capable of targeting metastatic disease (or cancers spreading to other parts of the body) must not only be discovered, but also diagnostic markers (or indicators of the disease), which can detect early stage disease, must be identified.

Researchers have been able to make important discoveries when studying multiple human cancers, even when they have limited or no information at all about the involved proteins. However, to better understand and treat cancer, it is important for scientists to discover novel proteins involved in cancer, and their structure and function.

Scientists are especially interested in proteins that may have a functional relationship with cancer. These are proteins that are either over-expressed or repressed in cancers, or proteins that have been modified or mutated in ways that result in structural changes to them.

Improving X-ray crystallography will enable researchers to determine the structure of many cancer-related proteins faster. This will lead to improving our understanding of the function of these proteins and enable potential pharmaceutical interventions to treat this deadly disease."

"What computers can run the "Help Conquer Cancer" Project?

Due to the inherent granularity of our image analysis problem, there are very modest memory and CPU requirements for the compute nodes. However, without access to thousands of CPUs, researchers would not be able to process 80 million images in a reasonable amount of time. Multiple platforms will be able to run the project; World Community Grid is launching Linux and Windows compiled code first, with Macintosh OS to follow"

Slightly more details on specs:
* At least 250 MB RAM (with virtual memory enabled)
* 200 MB Hard Disk Drive with at least 50 MB available for use
* The ability to display 8-bit graphics at 800x600 resolution
* An Internet connection with minimum 40kpbs speed
* Operating System: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista or Windows7.