Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases
What is protein folding and how is it related to some diseases?
We have had several successes of biology. In order to perform their functions, they must fold. This process (referred to as folding, from English to fold: Fold), critical and fundamental to all of biology, remains a mystery.
When proteins do not fold correctly (misfolding), there can be very serious diseases including well known as Alzheimer's disease, "mad cow" (BSE), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease, many types of cancer and related disorders.
You can help by simply running our software on your computer!
Folding @ home is a distributed computing project. Many people from all over the world download our client and they turn on their computers, thus helping to achieve one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes us more closer to our goals. Folding @ home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more complex than has been done so far.
What has been done so far?
We have had several successes. You can learn more by reading the sections Science and Awards , or go directly to the page of results .
Want to know more?
Click on the links above to download the software or for more information. You can also download a brief description of the project and look at some recent seminars on FAH (BMI Stanford, Xerox PARC ). can also help by donating funds to the project , through Stanford University.
