In an effort to find a cure for the COVID-19 coronavirus, researchers are using the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the IBM-built Summit, to find potential compounds that could be used to fight the pandemic.
Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are screening through more than 8,000 compounds to determine which ones can bind to a so-called S-protein spike. Viruses infect host cells when they inject them with a “spike” of the virus’s genetic material. If scientists find compounds that bind to the spike, they could potentially stop the virus from infecting host cells.
“Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer,” Jeremy Smith, director of the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory Center for Molecular Biophysics, said in a March 5 statement. “Our results don’t mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the coronavirus. We are hopeful.”
The researchers are planning to run additional simulations on Summit using updated information on the coronavirus’s spike protein which was published in the journal Science on March 13.
The supercomputer was commissioned by the US Department of Energy in 2014 and can complete 200 quadrillion calculations every second, which is around a million times faster than a regular laptop.
So far, the coronavirus has infected more than 263,000 people globally and killed more than 11,000, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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