

Google Pours “Incredible” Computing Power into Drug Discovery Via Startup Deal - robertbud1
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/02/03/google-pours-incredible-computing-power-into-antibody-drug-discovery-with-adimab/

======
MikeCapone
I wish they would do the same with University-based distributed computing
projects like Rosetta@home (<http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/>) and
Folding@Home (<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
No 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
Curious why the startup is based in Lebanon, NH.

~~~
timr
As 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.

