The Brisbane Times reports that Australian scientists have used a new supercomputer to simulate the movement of the virus that causes the common cold. The breakthrough opens up new targets for potentially life-saving drug treatments.
The deputy director of St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Professor Michael Parker, said he and his team had been working with the pharmaceutical company Biota Holdings to understand the rhinovirus, in an effort to develop a new drug to treat it in vulnerable people.
If you consider a virus as an organism, this is the first simulation of a whole organism, which is pretty exciting,” he said. His team had used Melbourne’s synchrotron microscope to look at the three-dimensional structure of the virus and the supercomputer to show how the virus moves.
Read the Full Story.