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The World Community Grid has a new project up from the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute in Japan. The Institute supports studies on the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer. This month, they would like to ask you to join their search for a treatment for neuroblastoma, a tumor common in childhood cancer.

As with many other projects on the World Community Grid, the project Help Fight Childhood Cancer models the behavior of millions of different molecules to find the best candidates to test in the lab. If you sign your computer up, it will test drug molecules to see whether they can block three proteins associated with neuroblastoma. The Chiba team estimates that they would need about eight thousand years on a single computer to get the information they need. Even with all the computers available to them, it would still take a hundred years to finish their tests. With your help, they think they can do it in two years.

This is undoubtedly a depressing topic to think about, and you probably don't need any more depressing thoughts these days. But this is a place where you can make a difference. Your computer may be not be idle often, but added up the entire World Community Grid community is currently running at about two million hours a day for a total of about 225 thousand years of processing time so far. If you don't have a computer, or it's already signed up, consider signing up others. T4T and IBM can help you reassure your company or nonprofit that the the software won't break their computers. Here's a presentation that may help.

So sign up! Or get in touch, spread the word, and help make those eight thousand years go even faster.