Supercomputers are being used to predict the spread of the virus, to optimize contact tracing, to allocate resources and provide decisions for physicians to design vaccines and rapid testing tools, and to understand sneezes.
The largest number of COVID-19 supercomputing projects involves designing drugs. Likely to take several effective drugs to treat the disease and allow researchers to take a rational approach and aim to selectively muzzle proteins that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, needs for its life cycle.
The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, uses a supercomputer to discover drugs. Building three-dimensional virtual models of biological molecules like the proteins used by cells and viruses, and simulate how various chemical compounds interact with those proteins and test thousands of compounds to find the ones that “dock” with a target protein. The compounds that fit, lock-and-key style, with the protein are potential therapies.
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