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wuffy68

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  1. You might be interested in reading the reply to thekeemo above. I hope it answers some common misconceptions (at least the way my team and I understand them)
  2. You're not the first to assume this. But it's more nuanced. The research is seeded by the NIH and NSF. The computational power comes from contributors like you and I. If the research results in a patent, by law, Stanford would have to sell that patent to the highest bidder (see Bayh-Dole act of 1980). Big pharma certainly would not get the patent for free, however to your point, all the research results not resulting in a patent are public domain. So pharma companies can just "look up" the results from Folding@Home protein simulations - but so can their competitors :-) So far, Folding@Home's results are just beginning to gain critical mass with nearing 100 PetaFLOPS of contributed computational power. Much of the work has concentrated on the study of protein folding dynamics and deep learning algorithms required to analyse the results, and optimize the work units to make the search for "drug-able states" more effective and less random. Over the last 8 years, they've been getting closer to patent-able lead compounds, but the research results impact many studies that also cite the completed work. You can read about a related series of Alzheimer's studies that have been used since 2008. Also of interest may be how pharma companies are incentivized to compete to solve 3rd world diseases through the Health Impact Fund (HIF) without any need to further soak 3rd world governments.
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