Stony Brook Professor and Team Win The Humanitarian Impact Innovation Award

STONY BROOK , N.Y. - Dr. Carlos Simmerling and team at Stony Brook University were announced in April as the winners of the Inatium® Humanitarian Impact Innovation award for "fulfilling a humanitarian need through ground-breaking biomedical research". The winners were announced on April 17th by Itanium® Solutions Alliance (ISA) at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing and Gelato ICE: Itanium Conference and Expo in San Jose, CA. Each winner receives a $50,000 US cash prize or charitable donation.

The Contest, organized by ISA was established to award innovative achievements using Itanium® 2-based systems. The awards are given in three categories including: Humanitarian Impact Innovation, Enterprise Business Application, and Entrepreneurial Innovation.

"This is a tremendous honor - one that recognizes what human effort and technological advances can achieve when brought to bear on a problem that had previously proved insurmountable," said Dr. Simmerling, associate professor in Stony Brook's Department of Chemistry and Director of Computational Biology for Stony Brook's Institute for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery.

The Humanitarian Impact Innovation category awards achievements using the system that demonstrate a profound impact on humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts. Examples this year included gene therapeutics, weather forecasting, and diagnostic research.

Simmerling and his team were among eight finalists for the Humanitarian Impact Innovation category including: Gencom, University of Houston, Stanford University, CINECA, Imperial College, Interactive Supercomputing Inc, and the University Karlsruhe's Weather Computing Center and Flow Simulation Computing Center. Meanwhile, seventeen other finalists competed for the remaining two categories in which Royal London Group coming up as the winner for Enterprise Business Application, and Secure64 Software Corporation for Entrepreneurial Innovation.

Dr. Simmerling and his team of researchers used Itanium® 2-based systems to advance HIV and AIDS research. Working on an SGI Altix supercomputer located at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the researchers were able to create computer simulations that provide a view of HIV's dynamic behavior at a level of detail beyond that possible through traditional experiments according to both time and space. The team achieved the most extensive computer simulations ever done on HIV protease, a molecule that slices a pre-HIV protein chain into the pieces that ultimately assemble into a mature and infectious virus. The simulations modeled how the viral protease changes structure over time, revealing for the first time how it transiently opens during its function, allowing drugs to gain access to the interior and inactivate it. Therefore, the results provide vital data for developing new treatments for people currently living with AIDS.

Dr. Simmerling and his team are also using simulations to research the treatment of tuberculosis (TB) and cancer, thus making their work worthy of the award as it recognizes "a profound impact on humanity through research".

Contest winners were chosen by a judging panel comprising of seven industry experts who reviewed each entry on the difficulty of the challenge, innovation of taking advantage, results produced, and originality of the solution.