Computers fight pancreatic cancer

The researchers behind the Screensaver-Lifesaver project – which uses the ‘idle time’ of millions of computers worldwide to screen for anti-cancer drugs – are now turning their attention to fighting pancreatic cancer.

The Screensaver-Lifesaver project is run out of the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Computational Drug Discovery under the direction of Professor Graham Richards, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

In a recent joint statement with the NFCR and Dr. Daniel Von Hoff of the Center for Targeted Cancer Therapies at the University of Arizona and the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Professor Richards described how the new collaborative research project will target developing cancer drugs to fight one of the world’s most deadly cancer types, pancreatic cancer.

Using the screensaver technology, several newly identified protein targets related to the development of pancreatic cancer will now be screened against more than 3.5 million drug-like molecules as potential drug candidates.