The processing power of grid computing will be used by University College London (UCL) this year to develop treatments that could be more effective in the treatment of people with HIV.
More than 33 million people live with HIV worldwide and 2.5 million people became infected with the virus in 2007. More than two million people died of an AIDS-related illnesses last year, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
The problem with treating the disease is that patients can build resistance to the drugs they are given. The HIV virus can mutate and change in different patients and this can make issuing the right combination of drugs difficult.
In response, staff at UCL will be using the combined supercomputing power of the UK and US ‘national grids’ to simulate a patient’s biological responses to drugs. Doctors currently work by prescribing a course of drugs and then test whether these are working. One of the goals of the project is for such ‘trial and error’ methods to eventually be replaced by patient-specific treatments tailored to a person’s unique genotype.
Very cool, it’s always great to see how the technology is being used (in this case research) as well as what benefits that grid technology can bring to those every day processing/capacity challenges with research, business analytics and computational risk.
