F@H and Ebola virus

[Gooders]

Evening all,

Was a bit edgy about posting this due to looking stupid, BUT could F@H do anything towards the Ebola Virus?

I know very little about it other than its killing the weak and what BBC News UK tells us.

How much different is it from Influenza? Are we already doing something towards Ebola? Usual questions...

[bruce]

[You've got a good excuse for following BBC News ... I just like BBC better than my local news. They are a good source of of information even though it's a somewhat limited quantity.]

Ebola is getting a lot of press, and it is a very serious disease, but it's not the most serious disease in West Africa. Lots more people are killed by several other diseases in Africa (Malaria, diarrhea, etc.) than by Ebola. I think the press is covering it because (A) World Health Org. noted that the illness rates changed, and (B) a couple of Americans contracted it, and (C) they recovered.

I'm not a health-worker, but I did live and work in another country where the basic concepts of Public Health are not well understood. I did contract a couple of those more-common diseases ... and I (obviously) recovered. Simple things like having clean water, washing your hands regularly, isolating people who are sick until they recover, etc. will go a long way to ending the epidemic. In addition to the widely publicized use of an experimental drug on those two Americans, these were the first two cases treated by US hospitals. Their Doctors did say they learned several new facts about treatment regimes.

Unfortunately I don't know the answer to whether FAH would be useful. There are good reasons to guess that it might, but hopefully somebody who knows the answer to your question will drop by soon.

[Jonazz]

Folding@Home has actively been doing research on viral diseases (lead by Peter Kasson), but they've always used the flu virus to do their research. But I'm confident that the results of these projects will help fight other viral diseases, like ebola.

You can find some more information here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/fa ... es/#ntoc15
http://faculty.virginia.edu/kassonlab/R ... rests.html

[Gooders]

Fully agree bruce, it is currently media driven and should it move to a well developed area im sure the death rate would be much lower. was just intrested in stanfords views too.


Thanks will go have a read

[Skymall]

I know this may sound like it is a response to the current news media, but wouldn't it be good for the project overall if you opened up a portion of folding@home specifically for the ebola virus disease? That could really get people interested and the word out about the project in general. Just an idea.

[Kjetil]

The idea is fine, but it will take a long time to find a cure.
PS: welcome to Folding forum and fold on.

[Jonazz]

Folding@Home has actively been doing research on viral diseases (lead by Peter Kasson), but they've always used the flu virus to do their research. But I'm confident that the results of these projects will help fight other viral diseases, like ebola.

You can find some more information here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/fa ... es/#ntoc15
http://faculty.virginia.edu/kassonlab/R ... rests.html

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=26704

And isn't there a Ebola vaccin coming out next year?

[bruce]

And isn't there a Ebola vaccin coming out next year?

Probably, but until it's approved, there are all sorts of things that might prevent it. (There are several being tested.)

Remember that ebola has been infecting people for 40 years, but the drug companies didn't focus their attention on it. Maybe this time it has gotten enough attention for something to happen. It has always been limited to small rural African areas and didn't spread to urban areas.

[Breach]

Ebola is getting a lot of press, and it is a very serious disease, but it's not the most serious disease in West Africa. Lots more people are killed by several other diseases in Africa (Malaria, diarrhea, etc.) than by Ebola. I think the press is covering it because (A) World Health Org. noted that the illness rates changed, and (B) a couple of Americans contracted it, and (C) they recovered.

Thing with Ebola is that while indeed it is not the most serious disease in Africa (if your priorities are based on mortality statistics and not individual fates), if these other diseases reach first world nations they can be dealt with, Ebola on the other hand...

[JimF]

Thing with Ebola is that while indeed it is not the most serious disease in Africa (if your priorities are based on mortality statistics and not individual fates), if these other diseases reach first world nations they can be dealt with, Ebola on the other hand...

Ebola could be dealt with too if people acted rationally. They are not at the moment. But things could calm down before Folding could make a difference, and whether it could do anything worthwhile before other methods become available is a question only the experts can answer.

[Ar`Kritz]

While the mortality rate of ebola is quite high, and it gets a lot of media attention, more people die from malaria every single day than the combined number of ebola deaths from 1976 up to (not including) this year's outbreak.

This year's ebola outbreak is, of course, by far the most serious to date, and more attention is and will be given to finding a vaccine/cure, but then again, there still is no cure for malaria...

[wuffy68]

Mod edit: merged with existing topic

Does anyone have information on which specific projects study Single Strand RNA viruses like Hemorrhagic Fever?

I think given the current epidemic in Africa (and isolated cases in western countries), knowing FAH is working on protein research related to these diseases will attract more participation in the network.

I found several references through a URL trail - but nothing definitive. Unfortunately this wiki page search function is useless:

Links:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja8032857
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_interfering_RNA

From Public Papers Page:

Structural Insight into RNA Hairpin Folding Intermediates
Gregory R. Bowman, Xuhui Huang, Yuan Yao, Jian Sun, Gunnar Carlsson, Leonidas J. Guibas, and Vijay S. Pande
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 130 (30), 9676–9678, 2008
ABSTRACT. Hairpins are a ubiquitous secondary structure motif in RNA molecules. Despite their simple structure, there is some debate over whether they fold in a two-state or multi-state manner. We have studied the folding of a small tetraloop hairpin using a serial version of replica exchange molecular dynamics on a distributed computing environment. On the basis of these simulations, we have identified a number of intermediates that are consistent with experimental results. We also find that folding is not simply the reverse of high-temperature unfolding and suggest that this may be a general feature of biomolecular folding.

[wuffy68]

..there still is no cure for malaria...

All very true - I found worldwide malaria deaths have reached over 620,000 per year with 76% of those deaths being children under 5. That's just staggering!

The fear of ebola, IMHO, is a mutated airborne version, since the virus mutates twice with every host it infects.
It's a scary prospect to think of passenger aircraft as a worldwide delivery mechanism to even the most northern climates:
Based on this CNN Article refering to the book "The Roots of our Ebola Fears"

A book chronicles the 1989 outbreak of Ebola Reston, which was transmitted among monkeys by breathing. In 2012, Canadian researchers found that Ebola Zaire, which is involved in the current outbreak, was passed from pigs to monkeys in the air.

Without a viable vaccine - an airborne mutation of ebola would spread uncontrolled like the flu virus. Making malaria look like the common cold. At least malaria is not transmitted human to human (no need for a space suite to work with Malaria victims), and it's spread can be curtailed through spaying insecticide and mosquito nets. Malaria is also isolated to the tropics.

[VijayPande]

The techniques we use in Folding@home are geared towards coming up with new lead compounds, such as our work in Alzheimer's Disease (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm201332p). Ebola has been an area of interest and I've been advising a company to use other computational techniques, leading to a drug candidate that's being pushed forward (http://Globavir.com). We've been pushing infectious disease work broadly in my lab using techniques fairly different than what we do on FAH now (especially Machine Learning and Deep Learning), but I'm looking to take those approaches to FAH to scale up what we can do in the future and have FAH help power this forward.

[Gooders]

Is there any ETA for this? Does this mean in turn we could all be researching other things than our current norm?