News

The Bowman lab at U Penn recently underwent a massive migration of our physical hardware.

Cryptic pockets are of significant interest for drug discovery. These pockets are closed in the snapshots scientists derive from experiments of what a protein typically looks like. However, in…

Folding@home lets us generate a lot more simulation data than is typically possible otherwise. Historically, lots of simulation studies have relied on a few simulations, let’s say one to ten. With…

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve rapidly, it’s interesting to regularly ask what AI means for Folding@home. In a nutshell, the current state of AI opens up lots of opportunities…

One of the big challenges with simulations of protein dynamics is getting enough data. That’s where Folding@home and all of the compute power that you volunteer to dedicate to running simulations…

Thanks to everyone who helped get a lot of great science done in 2025! We're looking forward to a great 2026 with you! First, the good stuff! Folding@home is continuing to provide insight into…

Mutations in the KRAS protein are among the most common drivers of human cancers, including lung, pancreatic, and colorectal tumors. Despite decades of effort, KRAS has been considered a particularly…

How do we know our molecular simulation models are accurate? This is a very important aspect of all the work we perform on Folding@home . If we want to use simulations to model the dynamics and…

With all the advances happening in artificial intelligence (AI), it’s natural to ask if one could develop an algorithm that predicts protein dynamics with far less computer time than running…

Last week we had a really nice meeting in Madison, WI on combining simulations and machine learning to understand protein dynamics. This meeting was hosted through CECAM ( Centre Européen de Calcul…

Early during the COVID-19 pandemic, our simulations of the coronavirus spike protein led us to predict that it opens up far more widely than previously thought. This opening reveals ‘cryptic’…

About 2,300,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. Of these, approximately 70,000 have mutations in the breast cancer gene 1 (BRCA1), which encodes the BRCA1 protein. BRCA1 plays a…

Please join us as we Stand Up for Science in cities across the US on Friday March 7. You can find more details on the main event in Washington DC and your local event here . Publicly funded science…

If you haven't already, we invite you to check out the latest release of the Folding@home client (v8.4.9)! This version makes it much easier to create and join teams. You can find the controls by…

Thanks to everyone who participated in Folding@home this past year, and happy new year to you and yours! With your help, we've made a lot of progress towards understanding biology and informing new…

There has been growing interest in developing drugs that bind two or more proteins to “glue” them together. Tacrolimus (aka FK506) is a famous example. Tacrolimus is an immune-suppressant that is…

A central goal of Folding@home is to use distributed computing to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable. Protein folding is a terrific problem to address with this approach: by spawning…

Computational chemistry and machine learning continue to play an increasing role in drug discovery. One advance has been the increased accuracy with which we can predict the affinity of a…

Peptides are short proteins. For proteins, one typically envisions a long chain of amino acids that has folded up on itself to form a compact blob that is capable of performing some function, like…

One of the Bowman lab’s major foci is on finding and targeting cryptic pockets. Cryptic pockets are absent in experimentally derived structures of what a protein typically looks like but open up due…

Folding@home is an unmatched resource for running molecular dynamics simulations on a massive scale. The need for significant computational resources doesn't end with data generation though, as…

The protein design field has been making great strides with the advent of new machine learning tools trained on large databases of protein structures and sequences. While designs coming from these…

In recent years, scientists have identified a new type of compartment in cells, often called a condensate. These condensates form when weakly interacting proteins and RNA molecules segregate…

We’re delighted to announce the full release of our new client software! We named this release “Bastet” after the Ancient Egyptian goddess associated with protection from disease. You can download…

Our new work shows how to predict the results of single molecule experiments from large simulations, like those performed on Folding@home. Showing that simulations are consistent with experiments is…

The goal of precision medicine is to utilize our knowledge of the molecular causes of disease to better diagnose and treat patients. In the precision medicine framework, diseases are subdivided by…

A number of active projects on Folding@home right now aim to understand how different forms of the protein apolipoprotein E (ApoE) determine one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s…

Folding@home has long sought to understand how proteins self-assemble, or fold, into their functional structures and what the functional implications of dynamics within the context of a folded…

The beta release of our new client software is going well. Thanks to everyone who has tried it out and given us feedback! If you haven't already, you can download the software here . This new client…

When it comes to designing novel drugs, achieving specificity is a major challenge. An effective drug must bind tightly to its target protein while avoiding unwanted side effects that can result from…

G proteins are essential molecular players in the intricate symphony of cellular signaling. From our vision to our sense of smell, neurotransmission to cell growth, G proteins are at the core of…

World map showing global distribution of Folding@home users from Nature Chemistry 13:651–659, 2021 paper. This past year, we have largely focused on following through on our commitment to take on…

Rev up your GPUs and help us in the final stretch of nominating a patent-free oral antiviral for preclinical studies!

Folding@home helps experimental collaborators understand mutations that drive increased fitness of SARS-CoV-2 mutants.

We're thrilled to report that the COVID Moonshot has been awarded a $10M grant from the Wellcome Trust on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO) Access to COVID Tools (ACT) Accelerator program…

Sprint 10 aims to help optimize the P1 pocket substituent to work around metabolism issues with our current best lead compounds. We've been quiet lately, but that's because we've been working nonstop…

TL;DR: During 2020, Folding@home was like the citizens’ fleet in the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Everyone came together to face a common foe, in this case the SARS-CoV-2 virus…

As we all know, coronaviruses are a major threat to human health. In the past two decades these viruses have caused three epidemics: SARS in 2004, MERS in 2012, and now, COVID-19 has caused a global…

Sprint 5 to prioritize compounds for the open science patent-free COVID Moonshot drug discovery project has launched! Rev up your GPUs to help develop a new therapy.

Several antibodies are now in clinical trials to both treat and provide protection against COVID-19. But one of these binds in a completely surprising way, and in a manner that may head off viral resistance. How does it work? We’re trying to find out!

As the COVID Moonshot continues to make rapid progress, the fourth free energy sprint focused on a backup lead series that suddenly pulls into the lead!

Folding@home adds CUDA support to give NVIDIA GPUs big boosts in speed!

We're launching the third weekly compound prioritization sprint for the COVID Moonshot ! This sprint focuses on our benzotriazole lead series. These compounds came about from a previous series of…

Help us reach our weekend goal so the COVID Moonshot can make rapid progress toward a COVID-19 therapy! The First COVID Moonshot Weekly Sprint has just come to a close! While this first sprint took…

Join our weekly sprints to prioritize compounds to make and test!

Maxwell I Zimmerman , Justin R Porter , Michael D Ward , Sukrit Singh , Neha Vithani , Artur Meller , Upasana L Mallimadugula , Catherine E Kuhn , Jonathan H Borowsky , Rafal P Wiewiora , Matthew F D…

Ion channels act as doors for cells: they open and close to let in and out the particles that carry electrical charge, the ions. Ion channels are therefore at the basis of the function of excitable…

In response to popular demand, we have created an update to the Folding@home software that allows you to prioritize COVID-19 projects. We encourage you to upgrade as the new software includes…

Coronavirus (CoV) has a capsid that envelops the single-stranded RNA genome. Three structural proteins are shown to be associated with the capsid: membrane, envelope, and the spike protein. Chemical…

The spike of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (shown below) is one particularly appealing target for designing therapeutics to combat the COVID-19 disease. It is actually comprised of three identical proteins…

We are excited to announce a new batch of small molecule screening simulations are now up and running on Folding@home! These simulations will help prioritize which molecules will be synthesized and…

Our recent focus on Covid19, Coronavirus research together with outreach from our community and partners like: Nvidia , PCMR , Github , Razer , Intel , Ubisoft and more. Has led to some interest from…

TL;DR: We’re simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a list of ways you can help. Proteins are molecular…

This is an update on Folding@home's efforts to assist researchers around the world taking up the global fight against COVID-19 . After initial quality control and limited testing phases, Folding@home…

We need your help! Folding@home is joining researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving…

In Project 10490, the Chodera lab is studying a small protein called KRAS, which forms a key link in growth signaling and cancer. This gene is something like a molecular switch with a timer. When it…

The Chodera Lab at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is now running a series of projects to study the conformational dynamics of histone methyltransferases to aid in the rational design of…

mTOR, a serine/threonine kinase first discovered in 1994, is a key signaling node that integrates a number of inputs to control processes such as cell growth and metabolism, among others. Due to its…

A lot of progress has been made in the last few years and we broke yet another barrier when we exceeded 100 PetaFLOPs.

In projects 10491-10499, the Chodera lab takes a look at mTOR, a serine/threonine kinase. The MTOR gene was originally discovered in yeast in 1991 and named TOR1/2 because it was the target of…

In collaboration with Sony, we brought Folding@home to Sony Mobile phones. During the months that followed the mobile application was made available with broader Android support.

In Project 10471 we at the Chodera lab are looking at Src kinase. The Src gene was first discovered as responsible for the tumorogenicity of Rous sarcoma virus. This gene is also present in animals…

You may have noticed a trend in the type of proteins being simulated on Folding@home recently. A number of Folding@home labs are collaborating in an attempt to understand the role of protein…

We are continuing to make a big push into studying cancer. Next up, is work relevant for breast cancer. Specifically, we have started to study the Her2 Kinase , a part of the EGFR family of Tyrosine…

The Chodera lab has teamed up with Luo lab at MSKCC to study another important class of cancer targets: protein methyltransferases . These are protein-modifying enzymes that catalyze the transfer of…

Guest post by Sonya Hanson, postdoc in the Chodera lab. (Project 10472) We're working our way through the kinase family here at the Chodera lab. You may have seen Danny's post about EGFR earlier this…

We reached a major milestone by breaking the 40-PetaFLOPs barrier.

Through a collaboration with Google, Huang Lab and Pande Lab we announced a first open beta test of our FAH client for Google Chrome that allows you to fold directly in your browser.

The paper on the results of a kinase study conducted by Dr. Diwakar Shukla and his fellow researchers has been published. This kinase under investigation is c-src, which has been a major research…

[Guest post by Daniel L. Parton of the Chodera Lab, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.] We’re about to roll out our first major F@h project on the new work server at Memorial Sloan-Kettering…

Folding@home has historically been an extremely powerful computing resource. And in 2013, we exceeded the 10 PetaFLOPs barrier.

FAH researcher Dr. Diwakar Shukla has continued work on HD. He has new results on the behavior of the HTT protein and will be presenting his results at the Annual AiChE meeting in San Francisco.

We are continuing our work with AD in terms of repurposing an existing drug against the leads we have found from Folding@home. The benefit of this approach is that this drug could hit the market…

FAH researchers Dr. Diwakar Shukla and Dr. Morgan Lawrenz have been using Folding@home to understand the fundamental behavior of kinases, key molecular targets in cancer. A paper on these results and…

We’re very excited to report on our progress towards our goal to develop new small molecule drug candidates for AD. In a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests…

We assisted Chris Garcia’s lab with their work with Interleukin 2 (IL-2), a protein which assists the immune system in fighting pathogens and cancer tumors. While injecting a patient with more IL-2…

We are simulating many forms of Pin1 WW domain, a protein implicated in some cancers and Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding the role of mutations on misfolding can have important biomedical…

We’re studying the folding of ubiquitin, a small regulatory protein found in almost all cells in human body. It is part of a large regulatory system that labels other unneeded proteins for…

At FAHcon 2012, Dr. Xuhui Huang presented our recent results of the molecular mechanisms of gene transcription. Transcription is the first step in reading genomic DNA, and regulation of this process…

Dr. Peter Kasson has been applying his work on viruses to cancer, as many cancers are virus-associated.

Please see this blog post for Dr. John Chodera’s anti-cancer strategy involving kinases.

Huang Lab at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is a part of the Folding@home Consortium. They started two projects researching misfolding connected to Type 2 Diabetes.

We celebrated Folding@home’s 10 year anniversary.

We started a pilot project on Malaria, building off methods used for our work on Chagas Disease.

We started a pilot project on Chagas Disease, which is a major disease in Latin America.

FAH researcher Dr. Veena Thomas has proposed a novel therapeutic strategy for HD and this proposal looks to be funded by NIH (as of September 22, 2010 still pending). This strategy is particularly…

We have been working closely with the Nanomedicine Center for Protein Folding on pushing our lead compounds forward. They have gone from the test tube to the first round of testing beyond that (onto…

FAH/Pande Group researcher Paul Novick has applied ligand-based methods to Chagas disease and in collaboration with the SPARK project (UCSF) and the McKerrow Lab (UCSF) has started to test the…

We started a pilot project on Chagas Disease.

In collaboration with the Nanomedicine Center for Protein Folding, we have been using our methods to further push a chaperonin inhibitor. This next round will use new scoring functions from Andrej…

Our new paper #62: “The predicted structure of the headpiece of the Huntington protein and its implications for Huntington’s Disease.” just came out in the Journal of Molecular Biology.

We have had some exciting results regarding new possible drug leads for Alzheimer’s. We hope to be submitting these soon for publication.

We’ve been using our new Protomol (Core B4) core to study the activation of src Kinase, an enzyme that is involved in the onset of some kinds of cancer.

Del has been involved in the development of new software methods (Ocker) for the chaperonin inhibitor project.

We presented our results regarding new possible drugs to fight Alzheimer’s Disease at a Stanford University meeting organized by the NIH Roadmap Nanomedicine center.

During this year we published our first work on some of the molecular interactions that occur during the initial stages of viral infection, and how they can impact current antivirus drugs.

We have also started to apply the drug design methods used in Alzheimer’s to HD.

Prof. Pande has presented the results on HD at a variety of Stanford internal conferences and meetings. People have been excited and interested in the results.

We presented our results regarding new possible drugs (small molecule leads) to fight Alzheimer’s Disease at a recent meeting at Stanford, supported by the NIH Roadmap Nanomedicine center and NIH…

The first of the papers has come out (see paper #58 on our Results page: “Simulating oligomerization at experimental concentrations and long timescales: A Markov state model approach”). In many ways…

Del has presented his plans to the NIH Nanomedicine center with a very positive response. Planning for the lab side of this work has begun.

Through a collaboration with Sony, folding was made available for PlayStation 3 users via a new client. Folding@home for PS3 was available until November 6, 2012.

Guinness World Records recognized Folding@home and its users as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

Nick Kelley has been working on a new collaboration with Judith Frydman’s group to computationally test a new hypothesis for HD aggregation found in the Frydman lab.

We have made some significant progress experimentally testing our computational predictions using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).

Plans have started to take a new approach for using FAH to fight cancer: to develop novel chaperonin inhibitors. FAH researcher Del Lucent is taking the lead. See this blog post for more information…

The first papers on Folding@home results in regards to Huntington’s Disease were submitted.

We are currently in the process of submitting our first paper on FAH results.

We have submitted our first paper for peer review and we’re working on the next 2 paper right now. We’re very excited about the results!

FAH researcher Dr. Lillian Chong presented her work on p53 at a lecture at several US Universities.

We started a pilot study on Parkinson’s Disease, and started to look for further funding to continue our work in the area.

Our first work on collagen mutations connected to Osteogenesis Imperfecta was accepted for publication.

The first work on cancer and p53 were published. We also expanded Folding@home’s p53 work to other related systems.

The first paper from the Pande Lab on Folding@home and Alzheimer’s Disease was submitted. In addition, Folding@home researchers Vishal Vaidyanathan and Nick Kelley presented the latest of our results…

We started work on our first paper with results from our ribosome simulations, within the field of antibiotics. Professor Vijay Pande also presented ribosome results both at a protein folding…

Prof. Vijay Pande presented recent FAH work on AD at the National Parkinson’s Foundation conference.

We have only done a pilot study on PD and are looking for funding to continue our work in this area.

Prof. Vijay Pande presented recent FAH work on AD at the National Parkinson’s Foundation conference (in the session on AD and its connections to PD).

AH researchers Vishal Vaidyanathan and Nick Kelley presented the recent FAH results on AD at BCATS 2005. Their work won the best talk award in 2005.

We submitted our first paper on FAH results.

Two new sets of projects have completed and two new papers are being readied for peer-reviewed publication.

We are getting some interesting results from recent new FAH p53 projects.

We are expanding FAH’s p53 work to other related p53 systems

Our first work on cancer has recently been published.

We released our software to the public and very soon after we had thousands of computers donating otherwise unused computer power.