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“Enlisting the help of World Community Grid volunteers will enable us to computationally evaluate over 20 million compounds in just the initial phase and potentially up to 90 million compounds in future phases,” said Carolina Horta Andrade, Ph.D., adjunct professor at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil and the lead researcher on the OpenZika project. “Running the OpenZika project on World Community Grid will allow us to greatly expand the scale of our project, and it will accelerate the rate at which we can obtain the results toward an antiviral drug for the Zika virus.”

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Sequencing of the virus in Cabo Verde by Institut Pasteur, Dakar confirms that the Zika virus currently circulating in Cabo Verde is the same as the one circulating in the Americas – the Asian type- and was most likely imported from Brazil. This is the first time that the Zika strain responsible for the outbreaks linked to neurological disorders and microcephaly has been detected in Africa.

“The findings are of concern because it is further proof that the outbreak is spreading beyond South America and is on the doorstep of Africa. This information will help African countries to re-evaluate their level of risk and adapt and increase their levels of preparedness,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

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IBM’s World Community Grid and scientists from Brazil, the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego, and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School have launched OpenZika, a project to find drug candidates to treat Zika, a fast spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

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Drug discovery scientist teams up with crowdsourced research project.

IBMs World Community Grid and scientists from Brazil, the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego, and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School have launched OpenZika, a project to find drug candidates to treat Zika, a fast spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

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Rutgers is taking a leading role in an IBM-sponsored World Community Grid project that will use supercomputing power to identify potential drug candidates to cure the Zika virus. The project, known as OpenZika, employs a global team of scientists who will perform “virtual” experiments in a search of treatments for the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

OpenZika will screen current drugs and millions of drug-like compounds from existing databases against models of Zika protein structures (and also against structures of proteins from related viruses, including West Nile Virus and Dengue). These computational results will be shared quickly with the research community and general public, with compounds showing the most promise then tested in laboratory settings.

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