From 15th to 17th of July, Rimini has hosted the biggest international festival on digital and social Innovation: the Web Marketing Festival (WMF). The goal of the event is to foster a better future enhancing digital education and promoting innovation, meanwhile boosting cooperation among social, economical, and institutional actors, both in Italy and in the world. The WMF, with its events and initiatives, is an accelerator for culture, education, innovation, and entrepreneurship, a tool at the service of society aiming at uniting people.
This year ABD has taken part in the event presenting the great work carried out by the Exscalate4Cov (E4C) consortium from the beginning of the pandemic.
During the event, Dr. Giorgia Frumenzio has explained the workflow and the goals of the project, highlighting how it is possible to use the new technologies in pharmaceutical research. In fact, in the EU project E4C, the HPC infrastructures have played a key role in the discovery of new potential drugs against Covid-19. Supercomputing, during the research, has been used to accelerate the computes related to molecular dynamic simulations of viral proteins, performed to study the movements of proteins during the time, and the computes related to the virtual screening experiments performed using huge databases with more than 500 billions of molecules.
Thanks to the massive computing power of the supercomputer Marconi100, the consortium has identified in few months a new potential drug: raloxifene, currently used in the clinical trials at Spallanzani in Rome and Humanitas in Milan.