‘ Help Defeat Cancer’ Project Launched on IBM’s World Community Grid Expected to Speed Cancer Research

‘Help Defeat Cancer’ Project Launched on IBM’s World Community Grid Expected to Speed Cancer Research

IBM is working with researchers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey to launch a project that will unleash the power of supercomputer technology in the battle against cancer.

Help Defeat Cancer is the third project to use the enormous computational power offered by World Community Grid, the world’s largest humanitarian grid housing a virtual supercomputer. The Help Defeat Cancer project is expected to help researchers understand the underlying mechanisms of cancer in order to improve treatment and therapy planning for cancer patients. IBM will use its information technology capabilities to power the Help Defeat Cancer project on World Community Grid for a minimum of three months. The project will give researchers an opportunity to analyze large numbers of cancer tissue microarrays (TMAs) simultaneously allowing multiple experiments to be conducted in shorter periods of time.

“As a result of the Help Defeat Cancer project, World Community Grid makes it possible to analyze in one day the number of specimens that would take approximately 130 years to complete using a traditional computer,” said Dr. David J. Foran, lead researcher and professor of pathology and director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and co-director of the Immunohistochemistry shared resources program of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey. “Without World Community Grid, TMAs are processed in individual or small batches that are analyzed on standard computers.”

Researchers believe the speed and sophistication of World Community Grid could make it possible to detect and track subtle changes in measurable parameters that could facilitate the discovery of prognosis clues, which are not apparent by human inspection or traditional analysis alone. Researchers have already created a web-based, robotic prototype to automatically image, analyze, archive and share tissue microarrays. The Help Defeat Cancer project will begin with the analysis of breast cancer TMAs followed by an analysis involving head and neck cancers.

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