Smallpox screensaver

The threat posed by smallpox as a weapon of bioterror is widely recognised and vaccination is still the only way to fight the disease. However vaccination of huge numbers of people has many drawbacks such as a delay in efficacy and the risk of damaging side effects.

Now, a new project spearheaded by researchers at Oxford University aims to find a drug to combat the effects after infection. The project follows in the footsteps of an earlier 'cancer screensaver project', which has allowed the Oxford researchers to make use of the idle time of two million PCs around the world to screen many millions of molecules as potential drugs. Using this technique, drug candidates can be produced very quickly.

In the smallpox project, screensaver time will be used to find small molecules which inhibit a key enzyme (topoisomerase) used by the virus. The virus packs its DNA in a tightly coiled form to make it small enough for transport, but needs the enzyme to unwind again in order to replicate. If a molecule can be found to block the enzyme, the virus will not be able to replicate, and the spread of the disease can be halted.

The smallpox project could also have implications for cancer therapy, as some cancers also have their DNA supercoiled, which means that an enzyme blocker could potentially be used to slow cancer replication and growth.

Professor Graham Richards, scientific coordinator of the small pox project and Chairman of Chemistry at Oxford University, said: 'Nothing could be more appropriate in seeking protection against a universal threat than to engage ordinary people across the world in a co-ordinated effort to discover a drug which would render smallpox impotent.'

New partners include EvotechOAI, the European biotechnology company which has prepared the input information on the protein target. For its part, Accelrys has provided its Ligandfit program, the software used to estimate just how well a given molecule binds to the target, and hence just how good a drug it might prove.

The project will be powered by IBM high-end servers.

Oxford University is being assisted by colleagues at Essex University who are part of Oxford's virtual research group, the NFCR Centre for Computational Drug Design.

Details about the project and how to participate can be found <a href='http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/smallpox'>here.</a>