[RussEfarmer]

Some updates on COVID and distributed computing:

Folding@Home has been launching "Moonshot sprints," week long runs of testing for potential therapeutic drugs for COVID-infected individuals. They are currently on their third week and third batch of drugs to be tested. You can read more about it here.

The IBM World Community Grid project released their August 13th update for the Open Pandemics project, where they state:

Data analysis
Since OpenPandemics - COVID-19 launched in May, the project has screened millions of chemical compounds that may be potential treatments for the disease. The screening is still ongoing, but the research team has analyzed the results they've gotten so far (45.7 million runs and 2.3 billion poses), and have narrowed the initial group down to approximately 1,500 compounds (0.00003 % of the total ligands docked!) that have been selected for their interactions with the target proteins and that warrant further analysis.

Potential publications
The researchers are working on several papers. One is a paper about the history of AutoDock (the software that runs OpenPandemics, which was created at Scripps Research). If the paper is accepted, it will be published early in 2021. 
They also submitted a paper describing the development and application of protocols for the study of covalent inhibitors (including the reactive docking protocol used in the OpenPandemics). 
Another paper has been submitted describing their collaborative work with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team and NVIDIA to run simulations to identify new molecules against the SARS-CoV2 virus.

Read the full update here.

The University of Washington Institute for Protein Design (who runs the Rosetta@Home project mentioned on this thread) has released their 2020 report. Some excerpts:

Rosetta was used to accurately predict the atomic-scale structures of important coronavirus proteins weeks before they could be measured in the lab. Knowledge gained form studying these structures guides the design of vaccines and antiviral drugs.
...
In less than a month, [Institute of Protein Design] researchers designed over two million minibinder proteins to target the novel coronavirus. By April, over 20,000 of the most promising candidates had been tested in the lab. The current best minibinders neutralize live virus with activities rivaling the best known antibodies. We are working to advance these candidate drugs into clinical testing, with the support of Eric and Wendy Schmidt by recommendation of the Schmidt Futures Program.
...
When COVID-19 hit, we leveraged partnerships with [University of Washington] virologists and vaccine regulators at the National Institutes of Health to quickly create promising vaccine candidates. Our lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate induces ten-fold more protective antibodies in animal testing than comparable vaccines that do not use [Institute for Protein Design] technology. It has now been transferred to multiple large-scale manufacturers, who have begun producing it to enable entry into clinical trials anticipated to begin in early 2021.

Read the full report here.

Sorry if you don't like things like this, but I just think it's important.