Skip to main content

Grid computing is currently developing into a major driving force for new approaches towards collaborative large scale science. Several national and international eScience programs have fostered collaboration between researchers from different scientific do-mains and the first large scale experiments on grids infrastructures such as EGEE are underway. In the biomedical community, grid computing has initiated several projects on large scale in silico drug screening approaches. The project WISDOM (Wide In Silico Dock-ing On Malaria) was amongst the first projects in the public domain that made use of grid enabled in silico docking to simulate the interaction of potential drugs with target proteins. In silico docking is the first step in the virtual screening process, which is one of the most promising approaches to speed-up and to reduce the costs of the development of new drugs. WISDOM was organised in the course of the first biomedical data challenge for drug discovery on the EGEE grid production service and was effectively run between 11 July 2005 and 31 August 2005. In the course of this first real large scale biomedical application on EGEE, more than 46 million individ-ual docking experiments have been executed. 

The workshop on December 16, 2005 in b-it will bring together stakeholders from industry and institutions with a strong interest in this field to make use of the results obtained in the the WISDOM-project.