Thousands of people are affected by cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's or other diseases. You don't have to be a scientist to help find a cure.
The Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program helps to combat life-threatening illnesses by linking millions of PCs like yours into what we predict to be the largest and fastest computing resource in history. This "virtual supercomputer" uses peer-to-peer technology to make unprecedented amounts of processing power available to medical researchers to accelerate the development of improved treatments and drugs that could potentially cure diseases.
You can take part in this ground-breaking Internet-based collaborative medical research project by lending your PC's unused resources to the greater good. There's no cost to download and run the program and there's no noticeable impact on your computer's performance, because the program takes advantage of the processing power you're not using at the time.
The United Devices Cancer Research Program sponsored by Intel has been developed specifically to search for new drugs to treat leukemia. United Devices Inc. developed this program in conjunction with the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) and the University of Oxford.
As a first step to finding new drugs and a potential cure for leukemia-the No. 1 cause of childhood death by disease-researchers must evaluate the cancer-fighting potential of hundreds of millions of molecules. NFCR scientists estimate that this task will require a minimum of a staggering 24 million hours of number-crunching, which was previously unimaginable. Linking computers like yours to this project will enable the what could become the largest biological computation in history and produce faster results. Depending on the results of this program, the time required to develop a new treatment and drugs could be cut from twelve years to as little as five years.
This particular drug optimization program is evaluating four proteins. One of these four proteins has been identified as critical to the growth of leukemia; shutting it down might mean finding a potential cure for leukemia. The other three proteins in the simulation are very important to the growth of leukemia, and they have implications for the growth of other cancers as well. Stopping one of these proteins will likely reduce the growth of leukemia and have benefits for other cancers too.
[[How It Works]]
To join the effort to find a treatment for cancer and other devastating diseases, all you need is a PC and Internet access. Virtually any desktop or laptop PC can take part in finding a cure.
Download the file.
Run the file you downloaded and follow the installation instructions.
Once you complete the installation, the program is running and you are participating in helping advance medical research.
Begin by choosing and downloading a program at the Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program Web site. The first program available is the United Devices Cancer Research Program*, a drug optimization program developed to find improved drug treatments and possibly a cure for leukemia. The program is just under 2MB in size - only slightly larger than a floppy disk. When you run the program, it will automatically guide you through an installation process.
As the program runs, it uses your computer to begin processing a small packet of data. Once processing is complete (about a day later), the program sends the results back to a server and requests a new packet of data. If you aren't online when the processing is done, your computer will wait to send and receive data packets until the next time you're connected to the Internet.
The research program operates in the background, so you shouldn't notice it's running during computer use. It's designed to run only when computing resources are unused. As soon as you run an application that needs computing power, the research program will back down, and your computing performance will not be noticeably impacted.
Intel Pentium processor or equivalent
At least 48 MB RAM
500 MB hard disk drive with at least 20 MB available for use
256 color monitor with at least 800x600 resolution
An internet connection
Operating system: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6a