Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Help Fight Childhood Cancer was a distributed computing project that runs on the BOINC platform. It is a joint effort of Chiba University and the Chiba Cancer Center. Based on the results of this project, the Smash Childhood Cancer started in January 2017 looking for drug candidates targeting additional childhood cancers.
Project Purpose.
Neuroblastoma is the most common type of solid tumor which afflicts children. Three different proteins have been implicated in the production of neuroblastoma. If these proteins can be disabled, conventional treatments would be much more effective. Medicinal chemists have identified three million different molecules which might disable the proteins. Treating it as a problem in ligand docking, a computer program called AutoDock will virtually attempt to fit each molecule to each protein in such a way that the protein is disabled.