Achievements

[delanvital]

Hi all,

I am part of a folding team. As always, I am on the look out for people who might be interested in contributing. The main question is always what the results have been so far? On that I am aware of the findings/results section etc. and this is where I have a problem. I have also read the previous threads on how this research is ground work and procedures more than actual frontier work. I don't mind that. What I would like is a summary for normal people, which I can link to, hard facts, what folding has accomplished. The peer-reviewed papers are too complicated as PR stuff to forward to other people to show what is done. It does not need to be the cure for cancer in writing - but just in layman's terms what is done and what has been accomplished.

Any ideas?

[7im]

Start with the Diseases Studied FAQ

It lists results with dates for several of the running studies. It was just recently updated. Hurray!

IMO, that FAQ is more of a milestone page. Vijay posts the latest minor and major updates to the project on his blog (NEWS page linked above). Watch that one for updates as well.

[Cheetos]

EDIT by Mod: The next part of this topic was split from one dealing with criticisms of FAH called "Reasons for not using F@H" It has become more and more about what the scientific accomplishments are so I decided to put this part of the discussion where it's more likely to get specific answers to the science questions being posed.

In other forum some guys are trying to convince the others that F@H is a farce or that it's "sold" to the Pharmaceutic industry.

That would be impossible to prove. All of the results are published openly, and the documents are available to read on the project web site.

But a wise man cannot reason away what a fool believes.

There is no doubt that some companies in the pharmaceutical industry will make use of the results that FAH produces. The research is published in the public domain and those papers are freely available to anyone (perhaps for the publishing cost, depending on the policies of the scientific journal in which it is published).

The concept of "sold" implies that a particular company pays Stanford University for the research in order to keep it proprietary. Since FAH is funded partly by Stanford and mostly by public grants, the proprietary rights are not granted to a specific company but are open to anyone that can use the information. Those companies may be able to develop proprietary information from the information in the papers, but that research would be performed by each drug company independently (and in completion with each other) based on the fundamental scientific information that FAH has already discovered and published. Show your friends the list of papers:

Your friends may be correct about other Distributed Computing projects, but not FAH.

Wow, you're faster than I !

I was searching the forum and the site about it, translating some thing of this toppic for portuguese an than you posted.
Thanks !

I told them exactly what both of you said and some people still doesn't believe..

Besides that.. I think that's totally unethic use people's contribution around the world to fill the pockets, for me it's a first (and a logic) obstacle for the "conspiratory theories".

Now a question.. the F@H is developing drug candidates ?
That's not a conspiratory question

[bruce]

FAH is about understanding the folding process and about diseases that are caused by mis-folded proteins. There's still a lot to learn at the basic molecular level about the fundamental folding (or mis-folding) process.

That's not to say that drug companies are not already proposing drugs and testing them, but that's not part of the FAH project at Stanford University, that's part of their proprietary research.

The fundamental difference is whether the research is proprietary (paid for and owned as a trade-secret belonging to one company) or in the public domain (freely available to anyone to build their own research project on). The results produced by FAH are put in the public domain.

[Cheetos]

Thaks Bruce !

I thought that F@H could be testing some molecules as a folding/missfolding agent, for example, to avoid the b-amyloid agregation in AD.

Cheers.

[bruce]

They may very well be. I don't know the details of the research before it is published. Questions like that are better answered in the Science forum by those who shape future projects. I do know that the results of whatever they're doing will be made public. That's a condition of the funding process.

The business model of the drug companies depends on being able to complete drug trials and to get a patent on a specific drug so they can sell it exclusively. They would have to fund their own research (with money from their stockholders) to accomplish that.

[spazzychalk]

i think everyone here would benefit from some postings on here letting us know when things like papers and other things happen. a validation of sorts to us for what we do

[bruce]

What I know about the FAH has been derived from (A) the Stanford web-page, (B) Forum comment by the Pande Group, (C) The News blog, and (D) general knowledge about how research at a university is typically organized. Specific questions are answered by the experts in the Science questions/answers Forum and/or the Discussions of General-FAH topics forum.

[Flathead74]

new-paper-63-accelerating-molecular-dynamic-simulation-on-graphics-processing-units

There have been many announcements regarding papers and such; The above is but one example.

Others

Still more

[spazzychalk]

seems a large majority are techincal achievments. the last notable thing that happened was in december with the possible AD drug. whatever happened to that?

[clardav]

There are no new results/papers from a few months ago, and the a2 core is not ready for Windows Systems. Something is wrong, seeing the big number of folding crunchers. I hope that this will change soon.

[Flathead74]

There are no new results/papers from a few months ago, and the a2 core is not ready for Windows Systems. Something is wrong, seeing the big number of folding crunchers. I hope that this will change soon.

Nothing is wrong; These are complicated projects and much patience is required.

Perhaps they are in need of that next work unit that you will complete.

[bruce]

There are no new results/papers from a few months ago . . .

This is not uncommon. Publication of new papers often goes in waves.

It takes a lot of folding to get the raw data, then the researcher has to spend quite a bit of time analyzing the results and writing the first draft of a paper which is subject to comments by the co-researchers. When a paper is submitted for peer-review, there often are comments which may mean an additional round of analysis or even an additional round of folding. Once the peer-review process is satisfied, the paper is ready for publication. All that goes on as sort of "behind the scenes" work that isn't really visible to those of us who fold - - and we still expect instant response from those same people when we haver questions, suggestions, bug reports, etc.