World Community Grid of personal computers speeds up R&D

An attempt to use the distributed networking power of personal computers linked via the Internet should enable cancer researchers to speed up their analysis of data from 162 years to less than two, by viewing 86 million images of about 9,400 proteins, according to the UK charity Cancer Research UK.

The World Community Grid uses a similar approach to that first employed by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence's SETI@home project since 1999 to process data from radio telescopes. More recently, the network which uses computers' spare processing power when they are not in use, has already successfully compressed five years of HIV/AIDS research into six months.

Igor Jurisica, the lead researcher at the Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada, said the analysis would focus on defective proteins in the human body. He described the project's goal as: "to find proteins that will enable us to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms appear, to have the best chance of treating the disease - or potentially stopping it completely."