FhG - The Drug Discovery application, where scientists carry out in silico docking, was initiated and implemented by Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in Germany and the Corpuscular Physics Laboratory (IN2P3) of Clermont-Ferrand in France. It has been running on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science) production service since December 2004. In silico docking enables researchers to compute the probability that potential drugs will dock with a target protein and is one of the most promising approaches to speed-up and reduce the cost to develop new drugs to treat diseases such as malaria.

The application is part of the WISDOM data challenge which demonstrated how grid computing can help drug discovery research by speeding up the whole process. The sheer amount of data generated indicates the potential benefits of grid computing for drug discovery. The next step is to analyse the huge quantity of results provided by this experiment which will require significant data mining effort.

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