Grid Added Value to Address Emerging Diseases

Recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly around the world, either through human travel, like SARS and SIV(H1N1), or animal migration, like avian flu (H5N1). Among the biggest challenges raised by emerging infectious diseases is the constant mutation of the viruses, which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases, as new cases can appear anywhere, due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu, taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international Grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1, and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids also allow the integration of distributed data in a completely secure way. This paper proposes new approaches for the integration of existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology and in silico drug discovery, based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Grid technologies. Its relevance is being tested through the current H1N1 outbreak, with particular focus on molecular epidemiology.