Science AMA Series: We are 3 scientists who are collaborating on an open science project to find treatments for Zika. Ask Us Anything!

Abstract

Hi reddit! The Zika virus outbreak in the Americas has caused global concern. To help advance the fight against this debilitating virus, we launched OpenZika. OpenZika is a project running on World Community Grid, an IBM philanthropic initiative which provides scientists with free, massive computing resources, donated by volunteers worldwide. Specifically, we’re enlisting the help of World Community Grid volunteers to run docking experiments against crystal structures and homology models of Zika proteins (and other related flavivirus targets that are structurally similar) on their computers and Android devices. We are harnessing World Community Grid’s massive computational power to search through thousands of current drugs (to see if they can be re-purposed against Zika) and millions of drug-like compounds (to lay the foundation for subsequent drug development against Zika). After we have selected and our collaborators have tested compounds that could be effective in killing the Zika virus, we will publish our data and results and share them with the public. As soon as we have proven that some of the candidate compounds can actually either (a) prevent the replication of the Zika virus in cell-based tests or (b) prevent the virus from infecting cells, we and other labs can then modify and evolve these molecules to increase their potency against the virus, improve their other properties (such as solubility, permeability, and metabolic stability), and reduce their toxic side effects, to advance and accelerate the discovery and development of new antiviral drugs against the Zika virus. Carolina Horta Andrade – I am Adjunct Professor at Faculty of Pharmacy of Federal University of Goias, Brazil, and head of LabMol – Laboratory for Molecular Modeling and Drug Design. My research focuses on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) for Neglected Tropical Diseases and Cancer, using an integration of computational and experimental approaches in order to identify new hit and lead compounds for malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniosis, schistosomiasis, dengue, Chagas disease, as well as for cancer. My group is also focused on the development of in silico tools to predict ADME and toxicity properties of chemical compounds, and development of web platforms as alternatives for animal testing. My laboratory is working in collaboration with many researchers in the US and Europe, as well as in Brazil, integrating computational and experimental approaches to drug design and discovery. We believe that drug discovery is an interdisciplinary process and we need to collaborate to advance science. Alexander L. Perryman - I am a senior researcher in Joel Freundlich’s lab at the Rutgers University, New Jersey Medical School. I have been studying protein structures and how they interact with other molecules for 2 decades. For the past 18 years, I have been developing and applying computational approaches to help advance drug discovery and development research, with a focus on discerning mechanisms of multi-drug resistance and figuring out how to defeat them. I devoted a couple years to cancer research at MU, followed by a dozen years working on HIV at UCSD and TSRI (including running the day-to-day operations of FightAIDS@Home on World Community Grid for 6 years). I also designed and ran the GO Fight Against Malaria (GO FAM) project on World Community Grid, which is when I began working on malaria and tuberculosis. In the Freundlich lab, I am the computational core that helps guide our research on tuberculosis and the drug-resistant ESKAPE pathogens (such as MRSA). Sean Ekins- I am CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. I have spent 20 years working on using computers to help drug discovery. Over the last 8 years I have worked on neglected diseases like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, Ebola and Zika. We will be back at 4 pm ET to answer your questions, ask us anything!