Friday, January 2, 2009

New Top 10 Team Member - Jawgz

Jawgz enters Aussie Rules Footy's Top 10 pushing BulleenAnt1 back to 11th.

As soon as Jawgz makes the 50k points milestone, all of our top 10 team members will have contributed over 50,000 points each. Congrats mate!

Team members
Rank
(within team)
User Score WU
1 Jens_Klausen 393409 876
2 smASHer88_PS3 313084 1252
3 Ravenge5 166003 745
4 RoXeD 132100 543
5 peterdiva 130630 181
6 Lahm_Family_PS3 124095 426
7 Ugly 114017 141
8 zoneur 87603 199
9 smASHer88 56995 194
10 Jawgz 46094 43

Possiblity for an Alzheimer's Drug to be made from new Folding@Home results

Vijay Pande posted on his blog back on the 18th December, 2008 about a Possible New Alzheimer's Disease Drug to be made from new Folding@Home results.

Vijay warns that although it's very exciting, this is still preliminary news:
"On Tuesday, we presented our results regarding new possible drugs (small molecule leads) to fight Alzheimer's Disease at a recent meeting at Stanford. This meeting was part of the NIH Roadmap Nanomedicine center retreat and was supported by NIH grants to Folding@home.
It's very early (so we are not publicly talking about the details until this has passed peer review), but we are very excited that it looks like we may have multiple small molecules which appear to inhibit toxicity of Abeta, the protein which is the toxic element in Alzheimer's Disease.

This is exciting in many ways. It's been a long road for FAH to get to this point, but we are starting to see the possibility of seeing these results published easily before our 10th birthday (October 2010). Considering all the technology development that had to be done in the first five years, these results have come very quickly (in the last 3 years), which is exciting. In particular, we are now looking to apply these methods to other protein misfolding diseases (we have pilot projects for Huntington's Disease underway).

Finally, I should stress that while we're very excited about this, it's still early and a lot can go wrong between where we are and having a drug that doctors can prescribe. Over the holidays, we will be double checking the experimental data, crossing t's and dotting i's to make sure there is nothing missed before we think about submitting this for peer reviewed publication. Also, there is still a long way from an interesting possible drug (where we are now) to something which has passed FDA clinical trials (where we'd love to be), and a lot can go wrong in clinical trials in particular.

Thus, this is an important milestone for FAH and we are very grateful to all who have contributed."
Hopefully all goes well and we can have a Alzheimer's Disease Drug on the market soon with Folding@Home to thank!

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