| Dallas, TX (April 27, 2020) – BALANCED Media|Technology (BALANCED) and Complexity Gaming (Complexity), one of North America’s most elite and longest standing esports organizations, have partnered together to announce #WeAreHEWMEN, a new citizen science/crowdsourcing effort to encourage the video game community to donate spare computer processing power to find treatments to fight the COVID‑19 virus. BALANCED, a crowdsourced healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) company that brings purpose to play, has launched the HEWMEN® Cell application, a free secure download that creates a virtual network to process drug discovery data for the COVID‑19 virus. Leading esports team and sponsor, Complexity, is urging the gaming community, including other esports teams, influencers and video game companies, to support the effort by downloading the HEWMEN cell application.
BALANCED’s HEWMEN (Humans Engaged With Machines via Elastic Network) technology creates a distributed network that processes data-driven problems such as drug discovery and medical research. The HEWMEN Cell application, which uses small amounts of volunteer computers’ unused processing capacity, has integrated BOINC, an open-source software platform used for volunteer resources developed by the University of California, Berkeley. It allows for the virtualizing of servers and applications inside a voluntary grid network and has been widely used with no security issues on millions of PCs. Most recently, the HEWMEN Cell app was used by BALANCED and computational biologist John Wise, Ph.D., of Southern Methodist University’s Drug Discovery Lab, for finding co-medications to enhance the effect of chemotherapy in the treatment of recurrent, resistant breast and prostate cancers.
BALANCED, working again with John Wise, will harness the power of the gaming community to have the HEWMEN Cell app process information from more than 200,000 FDA-approved existing medications/compounds against models of the protein and enzymatic functions of COVID‑19 to see which candidates prove most effective at reducing the virus’ pathology. Using these 200K compounds, between 1.5-3 million virtual experiments will be run, simulating attempts to dock compounds to specific locations on the virus. By identifying the compounds with the highest probability of success, the effort will dramatically reduce development cycle time and get new treatments to market faster.
“If there’s one universal truth about gamers, it’s that they’re always looking for their next challenge,” said Robert M. Atkins, CEO at BALANCED. “COVID‑19 is the biggest threat to humanity we are currently facing and there’s no community in the world more engaged online than gamers. This makes them the perfect group to empower to help put an end to the COVID‑19 pandemic. When they hear the call to help, they will answer. It’s the moment they’ve been training for since they booted up their first video game.” |
