Saturday, September 1, 2012

DARPA asks gamers to cure blood disease seen on battlefield ...

The Pentagon?s top tech research arm is reaching out to gaming community to help cure a blood infection that kills troops in battlefield hospitals every year.

The disease is sepsis, a blood infection that turns deadly when a patient goes into septic shock as the body tries to fight an infection. Troops often go into septic shock after suffering a massive trauma like losing a leg to a road side bomb.

Leaders of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, want to fight that disease and have challenged the game and online community at Foldit, a website funded by DARPA, to help cure it.?

DARPA has asked the Foldit community to tinker with protein designs in a massive brainstorming session to design new proteins to attack the ones that cause sepsis.?The hope is to design ?protein-based pathogen capture reagents to be used for the removal of circulating pathogens patients? blood as part of a larger [dialysis-like therapeutic] system,? according to DARPA.

The Pentagon had success with this approach in January when the Foldit online community of more than 240,000 gamers helped scientists remodel a reaction in organic synthesis. Had scientists had toiled over the protein design for years. Foldit users helped them solve it in three weeks.

Source: http://defensetech.org/2012/08/31/darpa-asks-gamers-to-cure-blood-disease-seen-on-battlefield/

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