Now you can help the researchers finding a cure for cancer. This may sound too good to be true, but your computer can actually help finding a cure.

Researchers have discovered that certain proteins have an influence on the occurrence and life of cancer cells. The theory is that if you find molecules that fit into these proteins, you can control the life and reproduction of the cancer cells as you are controlling the molecules. In principle, this is how most medicine work.

The only problem is that there are millions of molecules and even more combinations to try out. The researcher's computers do have the capacity and therefore they got the idea for this project. If you could delegate the task of testing the molecules on the proteins to a lot of smaller computers, you could multiply the computer capacity.

This is real as this work is actually done by the researcher's computers, but now your computer can do the same.

It requires the installation of a small programme, which you can get at Intel.. It does not take up a lot of capacity and it's easy to install. When the programme is up and running, you'll hardly notice it. It runs "in the background" or you can set it up as screen saver. In any case, your computer will not get any slower by having the programme installed.

This is how it works. You'll automatically download a certain number of molecules from the Internet, which will take a couple of minutes. Then, the programme will start calculating combinations. This takes about 24 hours, depending on your computer power. When all the molecules are combined, the programme automatically logs on the Internet, sends the information to the researchers and downloads the next set of molecules etc. This means the researchers only have to do a close study of the combinations, which are viable, …this saves time and they can use their energy on other things.

While it's calculating, you're not actually on the net, so you don't have to worry about the phone bill.

At the moment there are more than 250.000 participants worldwide and they have spent more than 15 million hours in total helping the researchers.

Just for fun, we have formed a team, with whom you can register here, after you have installed the programme.

I hope you'd like to participate. You can read more about the project here, and you can also find detailed instructions on how to download the programme.