James Delahunty
22 Oct 2012 19:51
Sony ends partnership with Stanford University's Folding@home.
Folding@home has been available on PS3s since 2007. Since then, more than 15 million users have participated in the program, logging more than 100 million computation hours to the project. Now, with the 4.30 firmware update for the games console, the partnership between Folding@Home and PlayStation is being terminated.
Folding@home is a distributed computing program that simulates protein folding as part of research into the causes of a variety of diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and types of cancers. The contribution from PS3 users has had a considerable effect on the progress made by the program.
"The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs.
"We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer's disease.
"The next steps, now underway at Stanford, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It's too early to report on our preliminary results there, but I'm very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate)."
Vijay Pande, Folding@home research lead at Stanford University