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Background: Despite continuous efforts of the international community to reduce the impact of malaria on developing countries, no significant progress has been made in the recent years and the discovery of new drugs is more than ever needed. Out of the many proteins involved in the metabolic activities of the Plasmodium parasite, some are promising targets to carry out rational drug discovery., Motivation: Recent years have witnessed the emergence of grids, which are highly distributed computing infrastructures particularly well fitted for embarrassingly parallel computations like docking. In 2005, a first attempt at using grids for large-scale virtual screening focused on plasmepsins and ended up in the identification of previously unknown scaffolds, which were confirmed in vitro to be active plasmepsin inhibitors. Following this success, a second deployment took place in the fall of 2006 focussing on one well known target, dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), and on a new promising one, glutathione-S-transferase., Methods: In silico drug design, especially vHTS is a widely and well-accepted technology in lead identification and lead optimization. This approach, therefore builds, upon the progress made in computational chemistry to achieve more accurate in silico docking and in information technology to design and operate large scale grid infrastructures., Results: On the computational side, a sustained infrastructure has been developed: docking at large scale, using different strategies in result analysis, storing of the results on the fly into MySQL databases and application of molecular dynamics refinement are MM-PBSA and MM-GBSA rescoring. The modeling results obtained are very promising. Based on the modeling results, In vitro results are underway for all the targets against which screening is performed., Conclusion: The current paper describes the rational drug discovery activity at large scale, especially molecular docking using FlexX software on computational grids in finding hits against three different targets (PfGST, PfDHFR, PvDHFR (wild type and mutant forms) implicated in malaria. Grid-enabled virtual screening approach is proposed to produce focus compound libraries for other biological targets relevant to fight the infectious diseases of the developing world.

Through this paper, we call for a distributed, Internet-based collaboration to address one of the worst plagues of our present world, malaria. The spirit is a nonproprietary peer-production of information-embedding goods. And we propose to use the grid technology to enable such a worldwide "open-source" like collaboration. The first step toward this vision has been achieved during the summer 2005 on the enabling grids for E-scienceE (EGEE) grid infrastructure where 42 million ligands were docked for a total amount of 80 CPU years in 6 weeks in the quest for new drugs. The impact of this first deployment has significantly raised the interest of the research community so that several laboratories all around the world expressed interest to propose targets for a second large-scale deployment against malaria.

Malaria remains a global health concern, which kills over a million people each year. In this paper we present work extending the approach of the WISDOM initiative by focusing on the problems noticed during the first WISDOM challenge against malaria and test the newly established, high bandwidth optical Grid environment VIOLA for advanced bioinformatics applications using the UNICORE middleware service. In addition we present an approach to reduce the size of the compound database to improve the efficiency of the screening.

After having deployed a first data challenge on malaria and a second one on avian flu, respectively in summer 2005 and spring 2006, we are demonstrating here again how efficiently the computational grids can be used to produce massive docking data at a high-throughput. During more than 2 months and a half, we have achieved at least 140 million dockings, representing an average throughput of almost 80,000 dockings per hour. This was made possible by the availability of thousands of CPUs through different infrastructures worldwide. Through the acquired experience, the WISDOM production environment is evolving to enable an easy and fault-tolerant deployment of biological tools; in this case it is the FlexX commercial docking software which is used to dock the whole ZINC database against 4 different targets.