Antiviral drugs are a class of medication used specifically for treating viral infections rather than bacterial ones. Most antivirals are used for specific viral infections, while a broad-spectrum antiviral is effective against a wide range of viruses. Unlike most antibiotics, antiviral drugs do not destroy their target pathogen; instead they inhibit their development.
SETI@home is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform created by the Berkeley SETI Research Center and is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and as such is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, an open-source middleware system, supports volunteer and grid computing. Originally developed to support the SETI@home project, it became generalized as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others. BOINC aims to enable researchers to tap into the enormous processing resources of multiple personal computers around the world.
Rimantadine is an orally administered antiviral drug used to treat, and in rare cases prevent, influenzavirus A infection. When taken within one to two days of developing symptoms, rimantadine can shorten the duration and moderate the severity of influenza. Both rimantadine and the similar drug amantadine are derivates of adamantane. Rimantadine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1994.
Amantadine is a medication that has U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for use both as an antiviral and an antiparkinsonian medication. It is the organic compound 1-adamantylamine or 1-aminoadamantane, meaning it consists of an adamantane backbone that has an amino group substituted at one of the four methyne positions. Rimantadine is a closely related derivative of adamantane with similar biological properties.
SZTAKI Desktop Grid (SzDG) was a BOINC project located in Hungary run by the Computer and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It closed on June 21, 2018.
Treatments for influenza include a range of medications and therapies that are used in response to disease influenza. Treatments may either directly target the influenza virus itself; or instead they may just offer relief to symptoms of the disease, while the body's own immune system works to recover from infection.
Influenza research involves investigating molecular virology, pathogenesis, host immune responses, genomics, and epidemiology regarding influenza. The main goal of research is to develop influenza countermeasures such as vaccines, therapies and diagnostic tools.
Umifenovir is an antiviral treatment for influenza infection used in Russia and China. The drug is manufactured by Pharmstandard. Although some Russian studies have shown it to be effective, it is not approved for use in Western countries. Chemically, umifenovir features an indole core, functionalized at all but one positions with different substituents. The drug inhibits viral entry into target cells and also stimulates the immune response.
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing, "an arrangement in which people, so-called volunteers, provide computing resources to projects, which use the resources to do distributed computing and/or storage". Thus, computer owners or users donate their computing resources to one or more "projects".
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together (DDDT) is a World Community Grid project sponsored by scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Chicago. Its goal is to identify new antiviral drugs effective against viruses from the family flaviviridae. The specific targets are:
Ibercivis is a distributed computing platform which allows internet users to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer cycles to run scientific simulations and other tasks. The project, which became operational in 2008, is a scientific collaboration between the Portuguese and Spanish governments, but it is open to the general public and scientific community, both within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The project's name is a portmanteau of "Iberia" and the Latin word civis, meaning "citizen".
Help Conquer Cancer is a distributed computing project that runs on the BOINC platform. It is a joint project of the Ontario Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. It is also the first project under World Community Grid to run with a GPU counterpart.
An antiviral stockpile is a reserve supply of essential antiviral medications in case of shortage. Many countries have chosen to stockpile antiviral medications against pandemic influenza. Because of the time required to prepare and distribute an influenza vaccine, these stockpiles are the only medical defense against widespread infection for the first six months. The stockpiles may be in the form of capsules or simply as the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which is stored in sealed drums and, when needed, dissolved in water to make a bitter-tasting, clear liquid.
POEM@Home was a distributed computing project hosted by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It modeled protein folding using Anfinsen's dogma. POEM@Home was started in 2007 and, due to advances using GPUs that rendered the BOINC program redundant, concluded in October 2016. The POEM@home applications were proprietary.
Docking@Home was a distributed computing project hosted by the University of Delaware and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It models protein-ligand docking using the CHARMM program. The ultimate aim was the development of new pharmaceutical drugs.
eOn was a distributed computing project for the BOINC client, which uses theoretical chemistry techniques to solve problems in condensed matter physics and materials science. It was a project of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas.
Triazavirin (TZV) is a broad-spectrum antiviral drug developed in Russia through a joint effort of Ural Federal University, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ural Center for Biopharma Technologies and Medsintez Pharmaceutical. It has an azoloazine base structure, which represents a new structural class of non-nucleoside antiviral drugs. It was originally developed as a potential treatment for pandemic influenza strains such as H5N1, and most of the testing that has been done has focused on its anti-influenza activity. However triazavirin has also been found to have antiviral activity against a number of other viruses including tick-borne encephalitis, and is also being investigated for potential application against Lassa fever and Ebola virus disease.
