Uncovering the potential of billboard advertising
We’ve partnered with Folding@home and Alliance Outdoor Media Group to use the amazing potential of our billboards to help with medical research.
Developed at the University of Pennsylvania, Folding@home is a computer program that helps scientists develop new treatments for a range of diseases like breast cancer, Alzheimer’s and even COVID-19.
The program crowd sources computing power from volunteers around the world to crunch data while they do other things.
In a world first, nib will be loading the Folding@home program onto the mini computers found inside two digital billboards in Sydney and Melbourne. The program will use the spare power of these computers to run medical simulations for cancer and Alzheimer’s research, feeding the results back to scientists in America and hopefully bringing them another step closer to a medical breakthrough.
How does Folding@home work?
Proteins are sort of like molecular machines, responsible for many of the things we associate with life, from causing our muscles to contract to digesting food. But when it comes to researching them, experiments only give scientists a single snapshot of what a protein looks like. Figuring out how a protein works from one of these snapshots would be like trying to learn the rules of football from a photograph of the players on the field.
How do volunteer computers play a role?
Folding@home uses computer simulations to watch how every atom in a protein moves and interacts. When volunteers join the project, their computer is given a snapshot of a single protein structure to analyse. The program will then spend about an hour simulating different movements and feed this data back to a team of scientists who can use it to develop new treatments.
Want to get involved?
Visit the Folding@home website and sign up to be a home volunteer.