You can make a difference…
Unfortunately, much of the world is affected by cancer.  Victims, family members and friends often times feel helpless – left to wonder how they might make a difference.  Thanks to the Compute Against Cancer® (CAC) program and the Global Grid Exchange®, all you need is a computer and an internet connection to join the fight.

CAC, an initiative of Parabon Computation, Inc^®, is a philanthropic computing effort designed specifically to support nonprofit cancer organizations that need access to massive computational resources. The Compute Against Cancer^® program provides a means for donors to put their spare processing power to good use by making it available to researchers in their quest to find a cure.  Donors from around the globe create a network which acts like a giant parallel processing supercomputer which cancer researchers then use to solve computationally intensive problems.

Compute Against Cancer^® has a longstanding relationship with West Virginia University’s Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center.  Dr. William Petros most recently used the processing power provided by the Compute Against Cancer^® program to study how drugs are metabolized in humans, a field known as pharmacokinetics (PK). In his latest work, Dr. Petros collected PK data on various chemotherapy drugs from a cohort of breast cancer patients. Additionally, data for several different nucleotide polymorphisms was collected from each subject. Genetic polymorphisms, small (sometimes single-base) variations between DNA of individuals, account for the differences found from one human to another (such as hair or eye color).

Dr. Petros’ data, which would have taken weeks to process on a single computer, was instead completed in just four hours using the processing power supplied by the CAC program. Using polymorphisms to explain the rate of chemotherapy metabolization measured in subjects, Dr. Petros found previously unreported correlations, suggesting polymorphism differences in subjects could account for drug “uptake.”

These findings may offer a new means of determining chemotherapy dosage levels for patients based on their genotype (whereas today dosage is coarsely estimated based on weight and skin surface area). Dr. Petros is currently collecting data for a follow-on study.

By donating the otherwise wasted idle processing power of your computer, you could play a significant role in helping researchers in their next big discovery – and help save lives.  Please click here to join the fight.