Science AMA Series: We are 3 scientists who are collaborating on an open
science project to find treatments for Zika. Ask Us Anything!
Abstract
Hi reddit! The Zika virus outbreak in the Americas has caused global
concern. To help advance the fight against this debilitating virus, we
launched OpenZika. OpenZika is a project running on World Community
Grid, an IBM philanthropic initiative which provides scientists with
free, massive computing resources, donated by volunteers worldwide.
Specifically, we’re enlisting the help of World Community Grid
volunteers to run docking experiments against crystal structures and
homology models of Zika proteins (and other related flavivirus targets
that are structurally similar) on their computers and Android devices.
We are harnessing World Community Grid’s massive computational power to
search through thousands of current drugs (to see if they can be
re-purposed against Zika) and millions of drug-like compounds (to lay
the foundation for subsequent drug development against Zika). After we
have selected and our collaborators have tested compounds that could be
effective in killing the Zika virus, we will publish our data and
results and share them with the public. As soon as we have proven that
some of the candidate compounds can actually either (a) prevent the
replication of the Zika virus in cell-based tests or (b) prevent the
virus from infecting cells, we and other labs can then modify and evolve
these molecules to increase their potency against the virus, improve
their other properties (such as solubility, permeability, and metabolic
stability), and reduce their toxic side effects, to advance and
accelerate the discovery and development of new antiviral drugs against
the Zika virus. Carolina Horta Andrade – I am Adjunct Professor at
Faculty of Pharmacy of Federal University of Goias, Brazil, and head of
LabMol – Laboratory for Molecular Modeling and Drug Design. My research
focuses on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) for Neglected Tropical
Diseases and Cancer, using an integration of computational and
experimental approaches in order to identify new hit and lead compounds
for malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniosis, schistosomiasis, dengue,
Chagas disease, as well as for cancer. My group is also focused on the
development of in silico tools to predict ADME and toxicity properties
of chemical compounds, and development of web platforms as alternatives
for animal testing. My laboratory is working in collaboration with many
researchers in the US and Europe, as well as in Brazil, integrating
computational and experimental approaches to drug design and discovery.
We believe that drug discovery is an interdisciplinary process and we
need to collaborate to advance science. Alexander L. Perryman - I am a
senior researcher in Joel Freundlich’s lab at the Rutgers University,
New Jersey Medical School. I have been studying protein structures and
how they interact with other molecules for 2 decades. For the past 18
years, I have been developing and applying computational approaches to
help advance drug discovery and development research, with a focus on
discerning mechanisms of multi-drug resistance and figuring out how to
defeat them. I devoted a couple years to cancer research at MU, followed
by a dozen years working on HIV at UCSD and TSRI (including running the
day-to-day operations of FightAIDS@Home on World Community Grid for 6
years). I also designed and ran the GO Fight Against Malaria (GO FAM)
project on World Community Grid, which is when I began working on
malaria and tuberculosis. In the Freundlich lab, I am the computational
core that helps guide our research on tuberculosis and the
drug-resistant ESKAPE pathogens (such as MRSA). Sean Ekins- I am CEO of
Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. I have spent 20 years working on
using computers to help drug discovery. Over the last 8 years I have
worked on neglected diseases like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, Ebola
and Zika. We will be back at 4 pm ET to answer your questions, ask us
anything!