Infection and disease are not suffered only in select corners of the globe – they travel the globe and require us to pool our resources and stand united in the face of global threats.

As this year’s outbreak has shown, Ebola is a deadly and relentless virus. It moves quickly and fatally, undeterred by national borders.

Understanding this, Dr. Erica Ollmann Saphire is doing something truly unprecedented. She has galvanized a global consortium of researchers to work together and defeat the deadly Ebola virus.

Early results from this consortium are encouraging, but more treatments are urgently needed to fight this deadly virus. Molecular images of the virus have revealed new cracks in its armor that aren’t reached by current drugs or antibodies like those in ZMapp.

Drugs against these sites could represent powerful new treatments, but will require massive computational power to screen. Together, we can solve this. Dr. Saphire has partnered with IBM’s World Community Grid to find drugs through the Outsmart Ebola Together project. This humanitarian venture harnesses spare computing power from personal computers and mobile devices of over 680,000 volunteers around the world. When otherwise idle, this network of devices forms a virtual supercomputer that can dramatically accelerate her cutting-edge research. World Community Grid volunteers have already enabled important advances in AIDS, cancer, malaria, and dengue fever research.

Dr. Saphire needs to hire a postdoctoral fellow with computational experience to analyze the enormous volume of data generated by Outsmart Ebola Together volunteers and identify the most promising drug leads for further testing. Through the overwhelming support thus far to Dr. Saphire’s crowdfunding project, she has been able to purchase a key piece of equipment for her lab at The Scripps Research Institute in California that will enable her team to process the hundreds of samples currently arriving from around the world. Help her now hire a computational scientist to harness the World Community Grid data and develop much-needed drugs.

Together, we can find a cure for Ebola – help Dr. Saphire raise $175,000 toward her pivotal research by giving financially on the page, and sign up at worldcommunitygrid.org to donate the spare computing time from your personal computer, Android device, or Kindle Fire to Outsmart Ebola Together. When your computer is idle, it can join the global fight against Ebola.