On Digital

Irfan Kamal January 9th, 2011

Could significant advances in science come not from machines alone but from the clever co-creation effort of both humans and machines ?

That’s the tantalizing promise of a novel social/crowdsourced downloadable game and the focus of a first-of-a-kind pharmaceutical industry-sponsored “protein folding” contest.

So what’s protein folding and why does it matter? The brief version: There are many ways that proteins can fold, and the prediction of the most likely shapes is extremely hard for computers to do.

Yet, the more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better we can design new proteins to combat disease and find cures for such afflictions as cancer and Alzheimer’s. For a longer description of protein folding, check this out.

Enter Foldit: this new game was designed and built by Zoran Popovic’s team at the University of Washington to allow people to fold proteins – without any special knowledge of biochemistry. Foldit uses humans’ ability to “see” in 3D – combined with a fun game environment – to help find the shapes that proteins will be most likely to fold into.

As part of its desire to support innovative work among rising new scientists, MedImmune (an Ogilvy client, and a biologics company that’s part of AstraZeneca) teamed up with Foldit to launch the 2010 University Protein Folding Challenge.

Over 20 teams from a range of leading universities (including MIT, Scripps, Purdue, Princeton, Harvard and Stanford) competed in the 2-week long Challenge, focused on finding an optimal structure for a pancreatic cancer protein.

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