FightAIDS@Home

FightAIDS@Home was the first volunteer-computing project to take on a single named disease as its mission. Originally launched as an independent effort by Arthur Olson's lab at the Scripps Research Institute in 2002, it joined IBM's World Community Grid on 21 November 2005 — and immediately became one of the largest medical-research efforts in the world by raw compute.

The project ran AutoDock, a molecular-docking program that simulates how candidate drug molecules might bind to HIV's protease, integrase, and other essential proteins. Each work unit tested one compound against one protein conformation. Across two project phases — Phase 1 (2005–2015) and Phase 2 (2015–2018) using the more sophisticated BEDAM + AutoDock combination — volunteers' computers performed billions of these binding simulations.

The science was not theoretical. In February 2010, FightAIDS@Home announced two compounds that bound to previously undiscovered sites on HIV's protease, opening a potential new class of antiretroviral drugs. In March 2019, a paper in JACS described a novel binding pocket critical for HIV-1 core assembly — found by screening over 1.6 million compounds against 20 conformations of that pocket. The project's first peer-reviewed paper appeared in 2007; many more followed.

FightAIDS@Home wound down with World Community Grid's transition from IBM to the Krembil Research Institute. It stands as the proof of concept that volunteer computing could meaningfully contribute to human medicine — opening the door for OpenPandemics, Mapping Cancer Markers, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy, and the COVID-19 efforts that followed at Folding@home and SiDock@home.