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 version, 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 (a client of ours, and a biologics company that’s part of AstraZeneca) teamed up with Foldit to launch the 2010 University Protein Folding Challenge last Friday.
The protein being used is one that’s important to understanding pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers.
To date, 20 teams from a range of universities are competing in the 2-week long Challenge.
Here’s the contest leaderboard:
Compete with others to solve an important protein folding problem. Challenge starts November 5, 2010. Cash prize for the top 3 teams. Grand Prize $5000. View all teams
Share your thoughts – is this type of human-machine co-creation a fun but niche idea?Or is this something that could become much bigger?
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