14 DAY TRIAL // The research conducted with help from the PlayStation 3 community at Stanford has contributed to the development of a compound that could lead to a viable drug linked to Alzheimer and its debilitating effects.
Sony says that the new firmware update 4.30 for the PlayStation 3 will eliminate the Life with PlayStation application before the start of November, which means that gamers will no longer be able to donate their time and hardware resources to the Folding@Home initiative.
No new sign-ups will be accepted after Thursday, but it seems that the entire effort has managed to bring some success for the researchers and that a viable drug might be introduced in the coming years.
Vijay Pande, the research lead working on Folding@Home at Stanford University, states, “We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@Home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer’s disease.”
The researcher says, “The next steps, now underway at Stanford, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It’s too early to report on our preliminary results there, but I’m very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate).”
The Life with PlayStation service was introduced in 2007 and, since then, 15 million users of the Sony home console have donated their processing power, which finally added up to more than 100 million of computational hours, most of them aimed at research linked to Alzheimer.
Sony has not offered clear motives for ending the Life with PlayStation service, but those who are looking to contribute can now do so using their home PCs.