Jason Roberts with a 3D image of the
polio virus on screen. New technology models the virus's interaction
with vaccines and other drugs. Picture: David Geraghty Source: The
Australian.
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The modelling represents a major breakthrough in the
battle to eradicate the disease, and could one day be used to find a
cure for HIV and other life-threatening viruses.
Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory
deputy director and lead researcher Jason Roberts said the simulation
was developed using the most powerful supercomputer in the southern
hemisphere, Blue Gene Q.
The technology, developed by the University of
Illinois for life sciences research, enables a model of the virus to
be built in minutes by mapping the atoms within it.
‘‘Without it, this research would have taken
months, if not years,’’ Dr Roberts said. ‘‘ When you’ve got
in excess of two million or three million atoms floating around in a
virtual system, it takes an incredible amount of computing power to
model that.
‘‘Up until this machine, this was pie-in-the-sky
stuff. Now we can actually do it,’’ he said.
Dr Roberts said the modelling enabled researchers to
see how a virus would react in different situations. ‘‘We’re
adding a drug in there, and that drug will float around in solution,
bind and do all the things it needs to do,’’ he said.
The campaign to eradicate polio has made significant
advances recently, with only 212 cases reported worldwide last year,
compared with 620 in 2011.
The disease is now found in only three countries —
Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan — where health authorities have
faced significant challenges in trying to immunise the population.
Reports late last month of a vaccine-resistant polio
virus emerging in at least 10 people in Pakistan prompted the World
Health Organisation to start using a different vaccine from the one
they have used for the past 50 years.
The supercomputer modelling would enable scientists
to deal with growing vaccine-resistant strains of the disease, Dr
Roberts said. ‘‘The simulation can be used to determine how the
virus mutates, changes with temperature, interacts with water and,
most importantly. how it interacts with drugs.’’
Dr Roberts said the research potentially had ‘‘huge
ramifications’’ for public health. ‘‘There’s nothing
stopping us in 10 years’ time moving this over to other viruses
such as HIV.’’
He said the researchers had chosen to work on polio,
rather than other viruses, because they had nearly 100 years of
research on which to base their modelling.
‘‘It’s one of the most studied viruses of all
time, so it’s a fantastic model,’’ he said.
Accuracy is one of the researchers’ highest
priorities as they work at such a minute level. They will need to
take time to perfect it before they can think about adapting the
simulation to other viruses.
‘‘The way I often like to imagine it is to tell
people it’s like walking into the MCG and saying you need to check
one chair to find out if it’s got four legs,’’ Dr Roberts said.
‘‘There are a lot of chair legs in the MCG.’’
