In the midst of the pandemic, Oracle is also taking part in the fight against COVID-19 by donating processing capacity for supercomputers in the cloud to the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), a social organization linked to the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC). The purpose of the donation is to support a project of the "Rede Virus" platform, an initiative of the MCTIC, through a combination of computational techniques of molecular coupling and molecular dynamics, validated by in vitro assays, allowing to select potentially interacting compounds, minimizing the occurrence of hits of false-positive compounds. CPU- and GPU-based high-performance computing is essential to accelerate these researches to provide compounds that may represent potential treatments against SARS-CoV-2 infections. The research results will impact public health in the Brazilian population.
Through the Oracle for Research (OfR) partnership program for scientific research, Oracle provided the computational capacity to the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), which leads the drug discovery front within the scope of the MCTIC Virus Network .
Oracle made available credits for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure High Performance Computing (HPC), a cloud solution for high performance processing, which is already running and helping researchers at the National Laboratory of Biosciences (LNBio) of CNPEM.
According to Paulo Oliveira, coordinator of the area of computational biology at LNBio/CNPEM, the use of technology is essential in the search for treatments for COVID-19. “We created a multidisciplinary task force involving virologists, biochemists, physicians, pharmacologists, structural biologists and computer scientists to find ways to combat this disease. Given the urgency of developing treatments and the need to know the molecular details of the virus, the use of computer simulations and application of machine learning techniques are crucial to speed up the discovery process. In this sense, the partnership with Oracle will bring tools that can accelerate our research”.
For Oracle, technology is one of the paths to discoveries in health. “Innovation is essential for collaborating with society, helping both in identifying cases and in speeding up treatment. We see that technology goes beyond solutions, as it prioritizes the human factor and, more than ever, this should be the premise of any discovery”, said João Pacheco, vice president of Public Sector, Oracle Brazil.
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