UCL in the News: The invisible man

'The Economist' Nine years ago a group of enthusiasts who were looking for signs of alien life in the universe had a bright idea.

They would farm the task out to thousands of owners of personal computers by sending them chunks of data from radio telescopes, along with the software needed to look for intelligent signals. That idea caught on, and is now applied to many other things, including the search for promising drugs. Researchers at UCL are taking it a bit further. …

As they report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Peter Coveney [UCL Chemistry] and his colleagues wanted to investigate resistance to saquinavir by using a computer model to predict how it binds to the particular forms of protease produced by different resistant strains of HIV. …

But Dr Coveney's study was also a test of what is known as the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH). This is a project designed to simulate the human body - a huge undertaking that has, perforce, to be spread over many supercomputers of the sort more usually used to forecast the weather and model nuclear explosions.

Dr Coveney recruited both Britain's national supercomputer grid and America's TeraGrid for the endeavour and, encouragingly, the project worked. …

The hope is that as the VPH becomes more comprehensive, and as the price of computing power falls, it might be possible to use it to design patient-specific treatment regimes "on the fly". …