Dev Blog

The CureCoin Team converted 100,000 CURE donated by our contributors into $2500 USD
… to donate some of your CURE, see “Donate CureCoins” 

Donor Acknowledgements

A kind -Thank You- to everyone who contributed to our causes during this round of donations, but a very special acknowledgement goes to our current folding champion, Mr. Ed Olkkola. He has directed our team to process all his coins into donations to charities like ANTRUK, Bonfils Blood Center, Rwanda Dream Medical Clinic, Stanford’s Pande Labs, and others in the name of the CureCoin Team. All his coins are generated thru large-scale contributions of computational power to [email protected]’s search for new medicines (over 20,000,000 [email protected] points per daywhich equates to about 700 CureCoins per day!) Mr. Olkkola’s computing power comes from custom-built servers of his own design, owned and maintained in two data centers; one at Mr. Olkkola’s residence, and the other at his company’s facility. Incredibly the theoretical costs of doing this much computational biology using the most popular HPC cloud services (like Amazon AWS or Google Compute Cloud) equates to about $1700/day OR amazingly over $600,000 per year!

Over the years, Mr. Olkkola’s dedication to Stanford’s Pande Labs advancement in the search for new medicines, as well as his charitable giving through CureCoin demonstrates multidimensional levels of philanthropy. This not only inspires members of the [email protected] community, but also those joining us with their laptops for the very first time.

Antimicrobial Research UK

ANTRUK, the world’s first charity tackling antimicrobial resistance, was established by a network of leading UK scientists and clinicians with the mission to educate the public about microbial resistance, promote the discovery and development of new antibiotic therapies, and support those currently living with antibiotic-resistant infections.

For over 50 years, the discovery of a new class of antibiotics has evaded the industry and the threat of antimicrobial resistance has ever increased. Recently, the former Goldman Sachs Chief and now UK Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Jim O’Neill, released his final report, which was part of a two-year Antimicrobial Resistance Review. This report highlighted the enormous need for new business models to fund and incentivise the discovery of new therapies to treat drug-resistant infections.

“If the rise in resistance continues at the current rate, ten million people will die each year by 2050 and Gross Domestic Product will fall by 2-3.5% — costing the world up to $100 trillion.” – Wired UK

Bonfils Blood Center

Colorado based Bonfil’s blood and marrow donation centers recently announced a merger with the national Blood Systems, Inc.

In this round, donations to Bonfil’s Blood Centers are going towards Everyday Lifesaving Operations and Transfusion Medicine Excellence Research.

Donations to “Everyday Lifesaving Operations” provide unrestricted funds that can be allocated when and where they are needed most. General operating support is often utilized to meet unforeseen emergencies, provide timely support for programs and equipment that allow Bonfils to better serve the hundreds of thousands of patients they help annually.

Donations to “Transfusion Medicine Excellence” achieve rigorous testing of blood and blood products to ensure safety, maintaining Bonfils’ status as a state-of-the-art blood center – adopting new technologies and staying abreast of the industry’s best practices.

Donors can designate their gift to any one or all of the following initiatives:

* Blood Supply and Patient Safety

* Laboratory Equipment

* Employee Skills Training

* Facilities Improvements

Dream Medical Center Rwanda

For the New Life Rwanda Dream Medical Clinic, CureCoin converted our donated CURE to USD. Donations contribute to helping establish a new medical center in Rwanda through Africa New Life:

* The center will be open to the public, adding important medical bandwidth to Kigali.
* Provide modern surgical, postoperative, and rehabilitative care for the people.
* A hub for Africa New Life Medical – provide full-time nurses to watch over 7K children.

Through this, we not only raise awareness for [email protected], but we also demonstrate how Curecoin can fund charities on a global scale. Special thanks to those who donated to our fund.

ThumbsUp International

ThumbsUp! International is a non-profit organization created to connect people across all abilities to conquer athletic challenges together, expanding attitudes about possibilities by embracing life’s challenges. We team able and disabled athletes to maximize their potential.

* … adaptive athletes compete with physically abled athletes in swimming, biking, running & triathlon events

Those of you who follow us may have seen us with Kerry Gruson, co-founder of ThumbsUp International in Miami. We recently noticed that their web page was down, so our founder Joshua Smith coordinated with the very gracious staff at ThumbsUp to get the site www.thumbsupintl.org back up with the ability to accept USD donations (click Support Us). While on the new webpage, we contributed converted CureCoins – with more donations scheduled in the future.

Kerry Gruson’s story is especially inspirational. She is a former New York Times correspondent who covered some of the most pivotal moments in US history. She also worked for the Harvard Crimson, Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe. Kerry continued to work despite her disability (sustained in 1974), all the way to her retirement in 2005. You can watch her story here

To donate some of your CURE to ThumbsUp, click “Donate Curecoins“

Kids Compassion Charity Donation

Toni Lane Casserly the co-founder of both online bitcoin publication CoinTelegraph and Kids Compassion Charity. In a recent conversation with Toni, we were convinced Kids Compassion is doing great work in Sierra Leone, a country recovering from the recent Ebola epidemic.

As a “TLC” and Mustapha Cole project, Musta was inspired to start a charity after realizing how many children lost their entire families to the Ebola crisis. Having lived through and having experienced Ebola first hand, he has seen how hard it is for children who are developing in elementary school ages to maintain stability and focus on the future through this chaos and loss. To rebuild these incredible children, Musta recruited TLC to form Kids Compassion Charity. They have since hand selected a high potential group of kids without families to provide these fertile minds with a home, a sense of belonging and higher moral / traditional education.

“We are starting small. Our first goal is to build out one school in Sierra Leone. When we are able to effectively care for the kids in this community, we plan to expand operations to help children throughout the continent have a safe space where they can thrive. Our education program focuses on entrepreneurial skills, technology, integrity, language and love.”

Pande Labs [email protected] Donation

The July 2016 donation to fund servers at Stanford’s Pande Labs / [email protected] brings the total amount of USD donated to Pande Lab’s to nearly $8,000 since CureCoin’s inception. We will continue to support [email protected] and helping fund Stanford Pande Labs equipment going forward. Great job to all donors making these donations possible!

Exchange Rates and Costs of Folding

As planned, the donated CureCoin (symbol CURE) plus their associated stake earnings were sold thru Bittrex, Livecoin or Poloniex exchanges. After conversion to USD they have been donated to above causes throughout July, 2016. To get the average exchange rate of CURE to BTC, consult Coingecko.

Do you want to understand the costs behind producing this much research on [email protected]?
* See our cost estimator spreadsheet from Dec 2015 showing 12 Equipment profiles.
You may be surprised just how serious distributed computing can be 🙂

Thanks and Happy Folding!
The Curecoin Team

On our 2016 two year anniversary, we’d like to highlight some of the actual scientific progress made by the [email protected] community (including the CureCoin team) since our 2014 inception:

• • Introduction
  • …So how does “Protein Folding” help?
  • Historical perspective using a series of Alzheimer’s Disease Studies
  • FDA Clinical Trial Phases Diagram
  • [email protected] Papers since 2014
  • Latest on SigmaX and CureCoin 2.0
  • 2016 Business Recap
  • 2016 Donation Recap
  • Costs of Folding (calculator)
  • IRC channel is back!

Introduction

Although we’d like to take more credit, it’s humbling to be part of a global movement of teams and individuals so committed to Protein Folding research. A lot of work remains on our part to catapult the CureCoin Team to the #1 ranking – although we have managed to reach the #4 spot in under two years – beating out several large corporate-sponsored teams along the way. We envision a combination of corporate and cryptocurrency mining community interest in CureCoin are the keys to accelerating research going forward.

“We’re pushing to design drugs that are (disease) selective at higher doses, without side effects that almost kill patients” – Vijay Pande (Paraphr. CoinDesk 2013 article)

“…techniques that we develop here very naturally have been applied to cloud computing, further broadening the impact of FAH’s scientific impact.” [email protected] blog 2016 projections

…So how does “Protein Folding” help?

Drug design has traditionally been slow, costing 100’s of millions of dollars, and is prone to stalling in Phase II trials. In projects like [email protected], the rewards are long-term. In-silico research is done at the earliest stages of the FDA drug approval process (see figure below). In addition to the study of multiple diseases (both infectious, and proteopathy in which proteins become structurally abnormal), [email protected]’s focus is on researching protein folding dynamics. Since proteins spend up to 96% of folding time “waiting” in various “intermediate conformational states”, there are countless, as yet undiscovered molecular interactions – especially those related to drug design.

… So the answer to the original question is – “it’s complicated” – but read on for a great example:

Historical perspective using a series of Alzheimer’s Disease Studies

• In 2008, [email protected] published a paper based on results from a study of Alzheimer’s Disease mechanisms “Simulating oligomerization at experimental concentrations and long timescales: A Markov state model approach”
• By 2012, this led to the development of a “Lead Compound” for a new Alzheimer’s Disease therapeutic strategy: “FAH simulations lead to a new therapeutic strategy for Alzheimer’s Disease – a source of a “Lead Compound”
• The drug was promising in animal models, however it failed in Phase II human trials due to a development of toxicity
• Despite this setback, the same FAH research continues to be cited by 23 studies – not all related to Alzheimer’s.
• Starting in 2015 those results are part of an ongoing research project to re-purpose an existing compound (video from ICME Xpo Talk) for use as an Alzheimer’s treatment!

Protein folding creates more opportunities in the early phases of drug design as well as enzyme research. As more computational power is added by contributors, the more “super complex systems” (like ion channels) can be explored in ways not possible a decade ago.

Acknowledgement of the [email protected] community in Pande Lab Scientific Papers since 2014

1. You can find the latest [email protected] citations on Google Scholar
2. Doctor Pande’s cited works located here.
3. Doctor Bowman’s cited works located here.

… be sure to also check out other scholarly works by other [email protected] associates who have co-authored these works

Conformational heterogeneity of the calmodulin binding interface
Free energy landscape of activation in a signalling protein at atomic resolution
Activation pathway of Src kinase reveals intermediate states as targets for drug design.
A network of molecular switches controls the activation of the two-component response regulator NtrC
Cloud computing approaches for prediction of ligand binding poses and pathways(credit Google)

Publicly available Papers [email protected] since 2014 (reverse order)

[email protected]’s articles website has been moved, you can find the latest published papers here.

129. MDTraj: A Modern Open Library for the Analysis of Molecular Dynamics Trajectories.
128. Heat dissipation guides activation in signaling proteins.
127. Efficient maximum likelihood parameterization of continuous-time Markov processes
126. United polarizable multipole water model for molecular mechanics simulation.
125. OpenMM: A Hardware Independent Framework for Molecular Simulations.
124. A network of molecular switches controls the activation of the two-component response regulator NtrC.
123. Elucidating Ligand-Modulated Conformational Landscape of GPCRs Using Cloud-Computing Approaches.
122. Variational cross-validation of slow dynamical modes in molecular kinetics.
121. Revised Parameters for the AMOEBA Polarizable Atomic Multipole Water Model.
120. Markov state models provide insights into dynamic modulation of protein function.
119. Cloud computing approaches for prediction of ligand binding poses and pathways.
118. Activation pathway of Src kinase reveals intermediate states as targets for drug design.
117. Statistical model selection for Markov models of biomolecular dynamics.
116. Dynamical Phase Transitions Reveal Amyloid-like States on Protein Folding Landscapes.
115. Describing protein folding via temperature-jump two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy and Markov state models.

CureCoin Cryptocurrency Update (SigmaX and CC 2.0):

Earlier this year, CureCoin announced a change in direction for CureCoin 2.0. Rather than having a single coin, the new blockchain will result in two coins. One will be CureCoin 2.0 (purely based on folding), the other will be a traditional PoW model called SigmaX. While both will share the same decentralized blockchain model, and both will be quantum resistant and utilize Merkle Tree Signatures; SigmaX is being developed for those who feel CureCoin’s dependency on signing certificates from DCN research lacks the purity required to compete in a decentralized cryptocurrency market on its own. CureCoin holders will be allowed to participated in SigmaX based on their holdings. You can read all the details and join the sometimes colorful conversation on our bitcointalk thread

Business Recap:

CureCoin is now available to trade on LiveCoin.net (and trading with our long time partners at Bittrex.net and Poloniex exchanges). Additionally CureCoin is listed on the CoinPayments.net marketplace which gives CureCoin the *potential* to reach a trusted network of over 31,000 registered vendors around the world. As part of the latest Fintech infrastructure, CoinPayments gives buyers and sellers peace-of mind through protected, secured transactions. Register your business to accept CURE today at CoinPayments.net!

Donations Status:

A special acknowledgement to our top folder – Ed Olkkola, whose massive donations of CURE (generated purely from his folding activities) are helping, or have helped fund donations to ANTRUK, Bonfils.org, Pande Labs, U-foundation Zambia, and the Rwanda Dream Medical Center. We’ve chosen to start converting Ed’s donations on the markets dynamically, so you wont see a large lump-sum of coins in the donation wallets which could impact the market price if they’re sold off too fast.

The Costs of Folding:

What are the actual costs behind producing this much computational research through [email protected]?
(Converting Points per Day PPD to CURE):
Estimate your own costs with our online calculator(beta)
… or see our
Dec 2015 estimates based on 12 Equipment profiles.

The IRC Channel is back!

Please feel free to join us on the CureCoin IRC Channel for anything that’s on your mind:
A new secure bot is back online, and tipping is available.

Also, we’ve found some members use bitcointalk and other social media sites for technical support issues. If at all possible, please use our support forum instead. This helps us track tech support issues in one place, and makes them searchable for everyone with similar questions.

Thanks and Happy Folding,
The CureCoin Team

It has not been quite a year, and about 2 weeks ago Team CureCoin has made it to Rank #4 in worldwide folding power contributions on the Folding @ Home network, the largest researched based DCN on earth. This goes to show people in the crypto community have the powerful setups and knowledge of cloud computing to really get some work done! There are a number of members on our team that have hopped team but some of the most powerful to come through, have come from the crypto community.

What does this mean for the future of crypto and research DCN’s? Well, one thing is for sure, Team CureCoin intends to find out! With CureCoin 2.0 about to have public beta testing soon, and the coming full launch of the CureCoin cloudfolding systems, we expect to see more and more participants hop on board. We are reaching out to many events in order to show people that folding for FAH can not only be rewarding in the sensation of helping humanity, you can be rewarded with crypto “Cure”ncy as well.

Our own Ivan Tuma Jr has just made a trip to another conference just last night to UCLA , expect a report from him soon. In the mean time let’s celebrate rank #4 as a team! Great job folders big and small!

With the 1 year anniversary of the original launch date coming up, CureCoin has proven to be a worthy cryptocurrency! With many coins coming and going in the blink of an eye, we are still going. Look forward to more exciting developments as time goes on and Team CureCoin prevails!

Donate CureCoin to fund an Endometriosis Pilot Study on the Folding @ Home Network

The donation campaign for this project has ended and funds have started to be converted. We will be updating our site with new campaigns soon

You can read more about the results of this campaign on the forum here

Recent data indicates that over 170 million women of reproductive age world-wide suffer debilitating pain and infertility from Endometriosis. “Endo” is linked to protein mis-folding, however there is no scientific consensus on its root cause. Theories include stem cells, genetics, and immunological factors. Women whose mothers suffered from “Endo” are up to 7 times more likely to exhibit symptoms themselves.

The ultimate goal of this study is to create minimally invasive, yet deterministic tests for Endometriosis pre-menarche (before first menses). Pre-teens at risk could be tested, and subsequently make lifestyle adjustments to prevent premature menarche, in addition to treatment with Combined Oral Contraceptives (COCs) early in puberty to dramatically reduce the risk factors of retrograde menstruation and Endometriosis. In rare cases – more aggressive treatments via puberty-suppression therapy could be explored.

Many girls with Endo enter puberty too early, while their BMI is still too low (min. BMI requirement for menarche is 23.7% ). Studies indicate worldwide age of menarche has fallen from 16-17 down to <13 as a possible byproduct of EDC (Endocrine-Disrupting Chemical) exposure. Although there are no known bio-markers for Endo (pre-menarch), we strongly feel computational biology can be leveraged to explore peripheral theories covering early menarche so "Endo" can be minimized or even prevented in future generations of young women. More discussion can be found on reddit at /r/Endo

This fund is the first of it’s kind, attempting to showcase the potential of CureCoin to help finance new research. Beginning a new study on [email protected] requires more than just computational power. Pande Labs would need manpower on the back-end to analyze the computational results – then conduct new experiments based on that analysis.

Update: We are officially extending the deadline for this study from 07.31.2015 to 10.30.2015.
We’ve begun investigating public crowdfunding (Indiegogo, Crowdster, etc.), foundations and celebrities.
If significant funds are not collected by the new expiration date, the collected coins will be rolled
into a general Folding @ Home Donation Fund.
(See “Donate CureCoins” tab at the right for CURE donation addresses).

References:
1. Wikipedia – Endometriosis Article
2. NIH Published Study linking Endometriosis to Protein Mis-Folding
3. Study: Body Size and Endometriosis
4. Is early age at menarche a risk factor for endometriosis?
5. Suppressing puberty with GnRH analogues
6. Update on Biomarkers for the Detection of Endometriosis
7. Worldwide average age of menarche decline (Exposures to EDC’s)
8. Endometriosis in Men induced by TACE
9. Baboon Model for Retrograde Menstruation and Endometriosis

Foundations for further reading or “fiat” donations:
1. Endometriosis Foundation of America
2. Worldwide Endomarch
3. World Endometriosis Research Foundation