Folding Forum

Since I installed V7 and started SMP folding, I haven't had one WU related to influenza. Lots of new projects (some related to cancer!) are now running on the SMP client as well. So now you can be 100 % sure that using SMP instead of unicore clients will advance science in every way, not just influenza research.

All the active bigadv projects seem to be working on influenza (6901, 6903, 6904, 8101). I haven't had one WU related to influenza myself though.

I'd take JonazzDJ's post further - I am pretty confident that lessons learned folding influenza can improve our knowledge in folding non-influenza diseases.

Also, one of the biggest myths about the Flu is that it's pretty benign... Influenza kills many people each and every regular flu season and strains such as 'Swine Flu' (basically just a variant of 'seasonal flu') disproportionately effect the young and healthy - perhaps because older people have already been exposed to an older, similar strain. So folding Flu WUs is still very valuable to FAH and man kind!

k1wi wrote:Also, one of the biggest myths about the Flu is that it's pretty benign... Influenza kills many people each and every regular flu season and strains such as 'Swine Flu' (basically just a variant of 'seasonal flu') disproportionately effect the young and healthy - perhaps because older people have already been exposed to an older, similar strain. So folding Flu WUs is still very valuable to FAH and man kind!

Indeed! As much as I'd like to see a focus on cancer, we can't just ignore the 1918 flu pandemic which may have killed up to 100 million people worldwide. And why are some viral strains more infectious than others, and why are some recent and notable viruses not easily transmittable between different species? Relevant topics to the answer: hemagglutinin, glycan, and protein folding/binding.

Jesse_V wrote:[...] we can't just ignore the 1918 flu pandemic which may have killed up to 100 million people worldwide. [...]

"Yes we can" ! For me and my family cancer is the biggest threat, so I am here to fight that, not something that affected our ancestors. So more cancer projects for my folding machines !

Remember, folding one protein can help even with unrelated ones as new things are learned about protein folding. So folding hemagglutinin (an influenza membrane protein) may actually assist in the study of the folding of p53 (a protein involved in cancer). So it's not like folding mostly virus-related proteins causes cancer research to slow down.

The good thing about science (and especially molecular biology and biochemistry) is that everything is related, so finding a "cure" or treatment for one thing may actually end up improving many other areas of medical technology (such as penicillin helping us understand irreversible covalent modification).

Personally, I agree that more effort should be put into cancer research, but I'm sure there's a good reason the current focus is influenza. Plus, the only thing that makes influenza so successful as a virus is that it is able to mutate extremely rapidly, like cancer. So if a lot of progress is made studying a fast-mutating virus, it might give some insight into fast-mutating cancers.

Also, cancer is a a very broad spectrum of diseases. So it's not that easy to focus on studying cancer when something like influenza (and Alzheimer's, etc.) is much more likely to yield helpful results fairly quickly.

Remember, most focus isn't going to influenza, but Alzheimers. It's the only disease the pande group has a possible drug (not a cure!) for. I even think Huntington's disease is the second most studies by f@h, but I'm not sure about that.

Anyway, one of folding@home's strong points for me is the variety in diseases they are studying. To you, cancer might be the biggest threat. People with Huntington's and Alzeheimer's know they will die (I don't want to sound cruel here). More and more people get diabetes and are forced to drastically change their lifestyle. I don't have to say anything about HIV.

"Doesn't matter I'll probably get hit by a bus anyway" - Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies

@7im: +1

Those who are interested in this thread should also check out this recent post: http://folding.typepad.com/news/2012/05 ... asson.html

Why do we study influenza? First, influenza kills about 40,000 people each year in the US alone and many more worldwide. These are mostly children under 2 and adults over 60, but all of us who hope to live past 60 and have children we care about find this a matter of some concern. Second, influenza has a proven track record of causing global mass-mortality events, such as 1918. A similar virus today might easily kill in the range of 60 million people, and we’d like to be prepared. Third, influenza is an important model system for understanding other viruses such as HIV and cancer-causing viruses such as HPV, Heptatitis C virus, and Epstein-Barr virus. It may come as a surprise, but many cancers are virus-associated, and these form an important area for prevention.

Add this to the project description of every flu project, and no one will complain anymore

JonazzDJ wrote:

Why do we study influenza? First, influenza kills about 40,000 people each year in the US alone and many more worldwide. These are mostly children under 2 and adults over 60, but all of us who hope to live past 60 and have children we care about find this a matter of some concern. Second, influenza has a proven track record of causing global mass-mortality events, such as 1918. A similar virus today might easily kill in the range of 60 million people, and we’d like to be prepared. Third, influenza is an important model system for understanding other viruses such as HIV and cancer-causing viruses such as HPV, Heptatitis C virus, and Epstein-Barr virus. It may come as a surprise, but many cancers are virus-associated, and these form an important area for prevention.

Add this to the project description of every flu project, and no one will complain anymore

+1

Heck, I fold for the fame and the glory of it, but mostly for the women.

Interestingly, the new FAH client V7.2.9 permits a choice of diseases under Configuration-Advanced preferences, and Influenza is not even listed!

Imho, this seems a bit bass-ackward because if everyone did that, the researchers lose control over their own scientific priorities in terms of what gets processed first! But presumably the majority have no preference and are OK with the researchers doing the prioritizing!

rbpeake wrote:Interestingly, the new FAH client V7.2.9 permits a choice of diseases under Configuration-Advanced preferences, and Influenza is not even listed!

Imho, this seems a bit bass-ackward because if everyone did that, the researchers lose control over their own scientific priorities in terms of what gets processed first! But presumably the majority have no preference and are OK with the researchers doing the prioritizing!

That doesn't work server-side. When it gets implemented, I suppose the client will "politely ask" the server for WUs for that disease, but I think the PG will have the final word on assignments. All things being equal, the request will likely be granted. Interesting that influenza isn't listed, since it's important area of research and has implication for other viruses like HIV, etc. Personally, I want cancer-related WUs.