Citizen scientists can help search for COVID-19 cure as they sleep

People with personal computers or smartphones now have the opportunity to become "citizen scientists" and join in the hunt for a cure for COVID-19.

One new initiative known as the Folding@home project lets users lend the unused background capacity of their desktops or laptops to a supercomputing network that searches for effective antiviral treatments for COVID-19.

A separate project, called Corona-AI, asks users to run an app on their phones that scours internet databases for existing food or drug molecules that may be able to help cure the disease.

The United Kingdom Science and Technology Facilities Council has lent its Hartree Centre supercomputing architectures and software to help run the Folding@home project, which is led by the Washington University School of Medicine in the United States.

To join the project, users download a software program that links their computer to a network. This network runs simulations that help researchers determine how existing antiviral drugs interact with the proteins that make up the novel coronavirus, clueing them in on how it can be disrupted or destroyed.

"It's not a way to provide a vaccine, but if suitable antiviral compounds are identified, it could help to treat patients who have contracted the virus, which could help them to get better more quickly and reduce the burden on critical healthcare services," said Alison Kennedy, director of the Hartree Centre.

Corona-AI is a link-up between Imperial College London and the Vodafone Foundation, which had previously established the DreamLab app to search for cancer treatments.

According to researchers at Imperial, artificial intelligence programs can analyze the makeup of molecules in drugs and foods, helping scientists identify potential treatments for viruses and other diseases.

Since its UK launch in 2018, the DreamLab app has identified cancer-beating properties in two existing drugs and 110 molecules in foods.

Users can now instruct the app to turn its attention to COVID-19 research. Instead of looking for brand new drugs, the project will search through databases of thousands of food molecules and existing drugs that could be repurposed to fight COVID-19.

One desktop computer would take decades to crunch the existing data on drug and food databases. But this computational time is greatly reduced if a program spreads the calculating burden across multiple devices.

"We urgently need new treatments to tackle COVID-19," said Kirill Veselkov from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, who is leading the research. "There are existing drugs out there that might work to treat it, and the great thing about repurposing existing drugs is that we already know they are safe to use and so we could potentially get them to patients quickly."

Users can run the DreamLab app in the background while their phone is on charge, and are encouraged to keep it on while they sleep.