Compute the Cure is a strategic philanthropic initiative of the NVIDIA Foundation that aims to support cancer researchers in the search for a cure.
Our goal is to collaborate with cancer research organizations, university researchers, and other interested contributors to develop computational methods or structures that will have an impact on cancer research, diagnostics and/or treatment
$200K Cancer Research Grant Awarded
The NVIDIA Foundation has awarded a $200,000 grant to a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, for her work in computer-aided drug design.
The Foundation's review committee selected Dr. Rommie Amaro, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to pursue her work on a shareable GPU-accelerated workflow to help speed the development of drugs to fight cancer.
Learn more here.
Why Compute the Cure?
Cancer claims more than 8.2 million lives globally each year1. Cancer is a disease of the DNA, created by uncontrolled division of cells in the body. When today's cancer patients are diagnosed, they are given medicine that works on a broad population, not one that targets their individual DNA.
The key to curing cancer is to understand what causes DNA mutations, and technology is playing an increasingly important role in this understanding. As the cost of sequencing DNA decreases, and the amount of data available for discovery increases exponentially, there's an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to leverage computation to push their research further than ever before.
We believe computation is the path to a cure for cancer.
Previously Funded Initiatives
The first phase of Compute the Cure involved funding Virginia Tech and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute to develop an open source software framework for cancer researchers, to improve the speed with which they identify the DNA mutations that lead to cancer. The platform, called the Open Genomics Engine, offers easy-to-access and popular algorithms for gene mapping and discovery, as well as GPU-accelerated re-alignment algorithms. The platform is now freely available to the research community.
1 – World Health Organization, World Cancer Report 2014.