Anyone with a computer can now join the war on terror by allowing excess processing time to be used by the Bioterrorism Antidote Project.

The non-profit organisation, Find-a-Drug, will use a distributed computing network similar to SETI@home to form its Bioterrorism Antidotes project, designed to find new drugs that are effective against antibiotic-resistant forms of diseases such as plague, smallpox and anthrax.

So far the network has 1,982 registrations, defined as successful installs, and 640 members, defined as those who have returned results.

The first target is Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, which was chosen "because of the very real threat of its use in biowarfare or bioterrorist attacks," according to Professor Erec Stebbins of Rockefeller University, one of the collaborators. The structure of a protein that plays a critical role in the development of the disease is known, and the project plans to identify a small molecule that can inhibit the active site of this protein.

According to Keith Davies, the developer of the software used by Find-a-Drug, THINK, the initial stage of the project involves processing around 40 million molecules. In six days the project received results for over 5 million molecules, so Davies estimates the initial stage should be completed in eight weeks.

The program takes each of 400,000 commercially available molecules and generates 100 similar molecules. In this way the majority of the molecules studied in the project have not been made or reported in scientific literature.

"The approach also has quite important computer network implications because it means that there is a 99 percent reduction in the amount of data downloaded by using this approach," Davies told ZDNet Australia. "The software also generates 3-D structures for the small molecules reducing the amount of data which needs to be downloaded."

Find-a-Drug is currently reviewing the options for the next stage of the Bioterrism Antidote project, which could be studying more molecules for this target protein, other targets for the plague bacterium, or other pathogens.

"The technology is appropriate for finding small molecule potential drugs which can inhibit the action of a protein target," said Davies. "In principle, this includes small chemical pathogens."

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