Folding Forum

How do we know when this Coronavirus research may result in something? And in laypersons terms has FaH achieved much over the years in terms of real world impact?

Results - https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/

Has it achieved anything? Yes. Several new drugs were based on the results published (and that was a few years back when I last looked. Probably more by now. TBH, I'm not the best person to answer this question, but since no one else has, i'll try.

So, in general, any accumulation of new knowledge is an achievement in science; e.g. knowing that something does not work allows you to rule that out and consequently move on to other things you have not yet tried. So with other words, even if no actual cure is created based on any direct result from F@H, it may still indirectly contribute to a cure by ruling out combinations that do not work, allowing other teams/scientists to try other combinations.

I'm not well versed in medical science specifically though, but my guess is that any positive result from a simulation like this would probably take quite a while to put into any practical use, and I would be surprised if any cure/vaccine took less than a year to get through the various clinical tests required.

Can I be cynical for a while?

This project is run by academic biochemists, so the two outputs are public domain datasets of new knowledge and academic papers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish

Commercial Drug companies will take that free data and use it to invent new drugs. They will do everything in their power to hide the fact that we did the research and instead tell Congress that drugs HAVE to cost a lot due to R&D costs.

Consumers will take those drugs and live longer. This is the step I am folding for.

Its not cynical when its true. Drug companies are greedy. But they also tend to be the only ones with the capital to create new drugs.

In any case publicly available data / datasets is very important and can only improve the quality of research work and results.

So basically what this program achieves is cost reduction in R & D for pharma companies who then charge Americans exorbitant rates? Welp thats a sad face, here I have a 1660 oc nvidia card doing nothing and a 2080 ti doing nothing. Do we know if results published in research papers from break throughs coming from this platform prevent the pharma companies from monopolizing a drug?