While the Help Stop TB researchers continue the search for new team members, they are also learning from the data they receive from World Community Grid.
The Help Stop TB project is examining part of the coating of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. The bacterium has an unusual coating which protects it from many drugs and the patient's immune system.As we learn more about the mycolic acids that are part of this coating, we can contribute to the search for better treatments for tuberculosis, which killed an estimated 1.6 million people in 2017.
Just before Christmas, some of you will have noticed that we had a break in jobs. This was due to a failure at our end, meaning that the jobs were not being sent to World Community Grid. Unfortunately, due to the timing of the fault, it took us longer to get back to full capacity. However, we took the opportunity to provide some tweaks to our scripts based on what we had learnt from the data to be able to generate more and faster jobs. So hopefully this means everyone is much closer to getting their next badge!
We are still working on writing up Athina’s work for publication and hope to have something out later this year. We’ve also been on a visit to Oxford to meet up with colleagues from France who may be further interested in using the data we’ve generated with their experimental models.
In other news, we’re still looking for people to join our team for the next stage of transforming the data gathered to date.
Thank you to everyone who is supporting Help Stop TB!