Help Fight AIDS . . . with Your Computer ARCS Joins World Community Grid

For immediate release

Imagine if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs were linked to focus on fighting AIDS.

To make this dream a reality, AIDS-Related Community Services (ARCS) has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 60 leading associations, companies, foundations and academic institutions.

World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

Over the last year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared with just 12 months on World Community Grid.

On November 21, 2005, World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home. FightAIDS@Home, which is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus from maturing and thus is a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life.

Possible future projects will address global humanitarian issues, such as new and existing infectious disease research; genomic and disease research; and natural disasters and hunger.

ARCS is encouraging its employees to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org. To join, individuals should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

“World Community Grid is a promising and innovative way of helping reduce the impact of AIDS around the world,” said Jeff Kraus, Executive Director of ARCS. “We are proud to be a partner and help further this important research effort and encourage our employees and others to join.”

ARCS is asking that employees who join World Community Grid become a member of the ARCSangels team. As part of the team, employees will earn points both as part of the ARCSangels team and as an individual. ARCS will publicize the points it earns as a nonprofit both internally and externally.

Join World Community Grid as part of the ARCSangels team today! Please go to HYPERLINK "http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org" www.worldcommunitygrid.org.