The Novel Coronavirus Pandemic that has taken a very busy world and brought it to a grinding halt has occupied every minute of every day for most folks in the world. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) strikes hard and fast in at-risk populations and causes severe illness and death in extreme cases.
Since BioTeam is a science-first company with a huge arsenal of technological capabilities, we have decided to join the fight against COVID-19 in any way we can. Last week, we announced that we are making our services available free of charge to anyone or any organization that could use our services. An article in Bio-IT World also highlighted this and a number of other groups that are making similar offerings. Now, we are taking on the fight directly.
As we have been educating ourselves about the disease and taking the necessary precautions internally to protect our staff and their families, we have come across a few ways that we can help. Initially, we decided to offer our computational power to the Folding@Home project out of Stanford University since they have added two projects to their molecular dynamics simulation job sets that look specifically for small molecule interactions with the spike proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the part that infects host cells). We have formed an internal team so that we can track our collective efforts. Our team started processing simulations in earnest last weekend with laptops and servers whirring away to help process the immense number of simulation permutations needed to find a potential drug target for this and many other diseases.
In recent days, we have started to discuss how we can be even more proactive in helping this effort be successful. Generous offers have been made for contributions to our efforts from organizations like TACC, ESNet, Qumulo, AWS, NVIDIA, Petagene, and Globus (with more on the way). Today we are having a strategy session to discuss what BioTeam can and should do to help.
Watch here for updates on our efforts! Stay safe and healthy!
