Supercomputers Recruited To Hunt For Clues To A COVID-19 Treatment

"The federal government is now adding supercomputers to its toolset in the hunt for ways to stop COVID-19."

"'ccording to an announcement by President Trump Sunday, a newly established COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will bring together industry, academic institutions and federal laboratories to try to identify or create candidate compounds that might prevent or treat a coronavirus infection."

"The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (one member of the consortium) is using its supercomputers to look for compounds already on the market that might foil the virus."

"'We could get these calculations done in one day on the supercomputer, whereas a normal computer, it would take a month,' says Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular biophysics at Oak Ridge."

"To run the calculations, you need to know the physical properties of the proteins a virus makes — what they're made of and what their shape is."

"One key viral protein of the coronavirus is called the spike protein. Information about what it looks like came out in mid-January, so Smith asked people in his lab if they wanted to start looking through databases of existing drugs that would block it."

Oak Ridge's approach involves what's called computational structure-based drug discovery. Basically, that means they use a computer to calculate how drugs might work against germs like viruses.