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Google Pours “Incredible” Computing Power into Drug Discovery Via Startup Deal
- MikeCapone 17y agoI wish they would do the same with University-based distributed computing projects like Rosetta@home (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/) and Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://folding.stanford.edu/). Whatever they find, and the software they produce will be available to all, compounding the effect of any discovery. Nothing wrong with investing in startups, though. I'm not saying it has to be one or the other. But I've been really impressed with Rosetta@home lately and I wonder what they could do with more resources.
- timr 17y agoNo offense, but that would be a colossal waste of time and energy. The entire field of protein folding is perpetually about 50 years from doing anything useful. And approaches like Rosetta don't contribute that much to knowledge -- you run it for a billion CPU years, and all you've really learned is that if you run Rosetta long enough, you can occasionally find some good structures. There are far more fruitful avenues of research in computational biology that deserve support -- unsexy things like comparative genomic analysis, searches for regulatory elements and networks based on large-scale gene-expression experiments, and other efforts to delineate the "parts list" of the genome. In general, sequence analysis techniques are much more practical than anything involving protein structures.
- raheemm 17y agoCurious why the startup is based in Lebanon, NH.
- timr 17y agoAs opposed to the Bay Area, you mean? Many of the big US pharmaceutical companies are on the east coast. Boston was/is the silicon valley of biotech.
- troystribling 17y agoIt is near Dartmouth. It is possible that it is a spin off of tech developed there.