University of Washington researchers use online puzzle to crowdsource COVID-19 treatments

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design are putting science into the hands of the public to help discover new antiviral drugs that might stop the COVID-19 outbreak.

Foldit is a scientific discovery game that lets users to contribute to biochemistry research in the relatively new field of protein structure prediction. Developed by the university's Center for Game Science and other academic institutions in 2008, Foldit challenges users to predict and design biochemical structures that can combat the disease-related proteins and possibly lead to cures for the disease.

The three-dimensional puzzle has been utilized to understand the molecular biology of many other diseases including HIV, Alzheimers, the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, and now the highly-infectious coronavirus in the game's new puzzle.

"[Proteins] are all very similar to one another mechanically speaking, but shape of protein determines its function," said Ian Haydon, the Science Communication Manager at the Institute. "These are the molecules that carry out all the microscopic functions of life."

And for coronaviruses, a large family of viruses that cause upper-respiratory tract illnesses, the protein design is fundamental to how it infects other cells.

"Coronaviruses display a 'spike' protein on their surface, which binds tightly to a receptor protein found on the surface of human cells. Once the coronavirus spike binds to the human receptor, the virus can infect the human cell and replicate," according to the puzzle's description.

Researcher Brian Koepnick explained that by manipulating the puzzle of the coronavirus spike protein, Foldit players are creating new proteins to effectively neutralize the virus.

"Right now we are challenging Foldit players to design a new protein to bind to coronavirus with the idea being if we can bind to it, [the new protein] can block the normal infection pathway,” said Koepnick.

The most promising user solutions will be manufactured in the university's lab where researchers can test the designed proteins to see if they will actually stick the the spike of the COVID-19 strain. A successful outcome has the possibility of being used in antiviral treatments after further testing.

The game is not-for-profit and has over 750,000 registered users, many of whom are working on the coronavirus puzzle as citizen scientists.

"As far as research goes, citizen scientists bring new ideas to the table and are good at thinking outside box," said Haydon. "When we have problems that are wide open, we can draw on creativity of citizen scientists, and protein design is a good field for that."

As the game itself says: "You don't have to be a scientist to do science."

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