How your personal computer can help science battle the coronavirus while you sleep

The key to unlocking the mysteries of COVID-19 and developing a treatment for it may come down to crowdsourcing.

Ever since the novel coronavirus pandemic erupted, scientists have been trying to understand why its so-called "spike protein," which it uses to bind itself to host cells, is 10 times stronger than than those found in other viruses, like SARS.

"The idea is to try to understanding protein dynamics," said Dr. Greg Bowman, a professor of biophysics at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis.

"Proteins are responsible for a lot of the physical processes, but they're hard to understand because they're so small we can't see them in action."

One of the ways scientists try to understand the problem is by run computer simulations of how the proteins work. But doing that requires an extraordinary amount of computing power, more than most universities or research institutions have at their fingertips.

Bowman said doing just one set of calculations in his research on his MacBook Pro could take 500 years.

But by creating a networked "super-cluster" of volunteers who allow researchers to use their computers, the process could take as little as six months, depending on the number of processors available.

"It's a way of breaking enormous problems into pieces that we can tackle individually," Bowman said.

Enlisting the power of many

That is the concept behind the Folding@Home program, which began at Stanford University about 20 years ago to study something known as protein folding. It moved to Washington University several years ago and has recently pivoted to work on COVID-19.

"Our focus really shifted on trying to understand how proteins function and malfunction, so it was very natural for us to focus on the current pandemic," he said.

Essentially, the program enlists volunteers who download software from the university website and allow it to run on their personal computers when they're not using the machines. He said the program uses extensive security safeguards to ensure the system is protected from hacking and difficult to exploit.

Two weeks ago, the program had 400,000 participants worldwide and has quickly grown to 700,000.

"Anyone can contribute," he said. "We have gamers running (the software) on their hard-core rigs, cryptocurrency miners, and major players in the cloud computing world."

He said the aggregated computing power would equal some of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Arizona company joins the effort

One of person taking part is Ian Horvath, president of Fusion Energy Solutions, a nuclear research firm based in Tempe.

Horvath has a bank of computers that normally run simulations of nuclear experiments. He's allowing them to be used for the COVID-19 project.

"All of the nuclear research reactors in the U.S. have been shut down because of the coronavirus," Horvath said. "Since that's basically what we do, we've been sitting a little more idle than we're used to.

"Of course we're all scientists here, so one of the things we wanted to do was take a look at the COVID-19 virus and see if maybe we could take some of our unused resources and use them to help solve that problem," he said.

Horvath, who works closely with Arizona State University, has been actively trying to recruit departments there to participate as well.

Bowman said similar conversations are taking place not just across the country, but around the world.

He has run the program for about two years and said the idea originated with his Stanford University graduate adviser, Dr. Vijay Pande.

It was modeled after a similar program at the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI@Home project, which uses a vast network of volunteer computers to analyze huge amounts of data from radio telescopes in the search for extra-terrestrial life.

A personal connection

For Bowman, the project is not just academic, but personal.

He began losing his vision at the age of 8 because of a protein mutation, which fueled his interest in protein dynamics.

And while it's early in the COVID-19 fight, Bowman can point to previous success.

"In taking a protein from the Ebola virus, that people had considered un-druggable, we uncovered a cryptic pocket that no one had guessed existed based on the simulations we ran," he said. "Based on that, we were able to develop a therapeutic utility."

Bowman said he wouldn't be surprised to see something like that happen with COVID-19.

"It's pretty crazy," he said. "People are very excited to help us understand everything we can with this this pandemic."

John D'Anna is a reporter on the Arizona Republic/azcentral.com storytelling team. Reach him at john.danna@arizonarepublic.com and follow him on Twitter @azgreenday.