NEWS RELEASE from the United States Department of Defense
No. 112-02 (703)697-5131(media) IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 8, 2002 (703)697-5737(public/industry)
ANTHRAX RESEARCH PROJECT DATA PRESENTED At a presentation today at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington,
D.C., the results from the Anthrax Research Project sponsored by Intel: http://www.intel.com/cure/anthrax.htm,
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/jan02/01-21anthraxpr.asp, the University of Oxford:
http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/anthrax/, United Kingdom, the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR):
http://www.researchforacure.com/site/PageServer?pagename=press_release_anthrax, and United Devices:
http://members.ud.com/projects/anthrax/ were
donated to the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Last January, 2002, the groups donating the research asked computer users around the world to join with them in the
Anthrax Research Project, an international effort designed to help scientists develop a treatment for the anthrax toxin.
Oxford Chemistry Department Head Graham Richards presented the results of the collaborative effort to First Secretary,
Science & Technology, U.K. Embassy, Chris Pook, and Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Counterproliferation and
Chemical and Biological Defense, U.S. Department of Defense, Anna Johnson-Winegar.
"The Department of Defense is very happy to accept this contribution and looks forward to enabling technology advances
through molecular design studies based on the structures of the compounds that have been identified," said
Johnson-Winegar.
Individual computer users participated in the project by downloading a screensaver and donating their personal
computer's spare resources to build a virtual supercomputer capable of analyzing billions of molecules in a fraction of
the time it would take in a laboratory or standard supercomputers. The screensaver worked by running whenever
computation resources are available. Once processing was complete, the program sent the results back to the United
Devices' data center and requested a new packet of data the next time the user connected to the Internet. The United
Devices program incorporates a comprehensive system of security and privacy technologies to protect user privacy.
Recent work has shown that the anthrax toxin has three protein components. One of these proteins, the so-called
"protective antigen," forms a ring. This ring binds with another protein, the "lethal factor," which facilitates the
entry of the lethal factor into a cell. Harvard University discovered that this binding could be inhibited, preventing
the resulting toxicity. Now, a group at Oxford University has identified the site on this key protein where the binding
occurs-where the right molecular interaction may inhibit the binding and ultimately prevent the toxicity that results in
disease.
The initiative is based on the successful Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project that harnessed the computing
power of 1.3 million PCs around the world to provide scientists access to a virtual supercomputer more powerful than the
world's ten largest supercomputers combined. This Anthrax Research Project drew upon the same distributed computing
technology to help scientists screen 3.57 billion molecular compounds against the fatal anthrax toxin protein with the
hope of finding a subset of drug-like molecules that could render anthrax useless as a weapon.
Screening is only one step in a long drug discovery process that ultimately must move from the computational realm into
the actual laboratory. The project used a 5-time redundancy rate for each molecule to ensure a high level of accuracy
and quality. Had this project been undertaken using traditional methods, it would have taken years instead of less than
4 weeks.
Preliminary indications are that the original pool of 3.57 billion molecules has been narrowed down considerably, having
identified over 300,000 crude unique hits in the course of the project. This screening phase has significantly reduced
the next phase of the discovery process, in which the ranked hits will be further refined and analyzed, thereby
accelerating the overall time to discovery and availability of a possible treatment.
ENDS