This episode was recorded in March of 2019 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Folding at Home, the distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, and originally aired on The a16z Podcast. Folding at Home is run on millions of devices, is the world’s largest supercomputer, and tackles some of biology’s toughest problems, including COVID-19.
Proteins are molecular machines that must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear string of amino acids, assume the complex three-dimensional structure needed to carry out its job?
That's where Folding at Home comes in. Folding at Home is a sophisticated computer program that simulates the way atoms push and pull on each other, applied to the problem of protein dynamics, aka "folding". These simulations help researchers understand protein function and to design drugs and antibodies to target them.
Given the extreme complexity of these simulations, they require an astronomical amount of compute power. Folding at Hold solves this problem with a distributed computing framework: it breaks up the calculations in the smaller pieces that can be run on independent computers. Users of Folding at Home — millions of them today — donate the spare compute power on their PCs to help run these simulations. This aggregate compute power represents the largest super computer in the world: currently 2.4 exaFLOPS!
Folding at Home was launched in the lab of Vijay Pande at Stanford. In this episode, Vijay (now a general partner at a16z) is joined by his former student and current director of Folding at Home, Greg Bowman, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and host Lauren Richardson. The conversation covers the origins of the Folding at Home project and the scientific and technical advances needed to solve the complex protein folding and distributed computing problems.
To find out more about how Folding at Home is contributing to the COVID-19 pandemic, check out the recenty published article from the Bowman lab, "SARS-CoV-2 simulations go exascale to predict dramatic spike opening and cryptic pockets across the proteome", published in Nature Chemistry.
The Science and Supply of GLP-1s with Brooke Boyarsky Pratt
The Science and Supply of GLP-1s with Carolyn Jasik
The Intersection of Biotech x High Tech with Vineeta Agarwala
AI in Pharmaceutical R&D with Kim Branson
Unleashing CAR T with Carl June
Longevity as a Health Asset with Tom Hale
The Power of Drug Discovery with Philip Tagari
AI-Enabled Continuity of Care with Ed and Todd Park
Grand Challenges in Healthcare AI with Vijay Pande and Julie Yoo
Adapting Biopharma to AI with Greg Meyers
Behind the Buy: Payors and Providers on AI Adoption
Biotech Revolution with Software Engineering Daily
Dark Genome Hunting with Rosana Kapeller and Marty Taylor
DNA as Data Storage with Vijay Pande
The Most Interesting Healthcare Companies You've Never Heard Of with Julie Klapstein
CRISPR by Design with Benjamin Oakes
Metrics for a Complex Machine with Josh Clemente
Transitioning From Gymnast to Investor with Aly Raisman
Finding PMF in Healthcare (After Tasting it Elsewhere) with Eren Bali and Max Cohen
IRA, AI Regulation, and the Future with Joe Grogan
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free