Grid-added value to address malaria.

Through this paper, we call for a distributed, Internet-based collaboration to address one of the worst plagues of our present world, malaria. The spirit is a nonproprietary peer-production of information-embedding goods. And we propose to use the grid technology to enable such a worldwide "open-source" like collaboration. The first step toward this vision has been achieved during the summer 2005 on the enabling grids for E-scienceE (EGEE) grid infrastructure where 42 million ligands were docked for a total amount of 80 CPU years in 6 weeks in the quest for new drugs. The impact of this first deployment has significantly raised the interest of the research community so that several laboratories all around the world expressed interest to propose targets for a second large-scale deployment against malaria.

The SHARE road map: Healthgrids for biomedical research and healthcare.

The HealthGrid White Paper was published at the third annual conference in Oxford in 2005. Starting from the conclusions of the White Paper, the EU funded SHARE project (http://www.eu-share.org) has aimed at identifying the most important steps and significant milestones towards wide deployment and adoption of healthgrids in Europe. The project has defined a strategy to address the issues identified in the action plan for European e-Health (COM(2004).356) and has devised a roadmap for the major technological and ethical and legal developments and social and economic investments needed for successful take up of healthgrids in the next 10 years. A "beta" version of the road map underwent full review by a panel of 25 prominent European experts at a workshop in December 2007. The present document is an executive policy summary of the final draft road map. It has sought to reconcile likely conflicts between technological developments and regulatory frameworks by bringing together the project's technical road map and conceptual map of ethical and legal issues and socio-economic prospects. A key tool in this process was a collection of case studies of healthgrid applications.

Replication and update of molecular biology databases.

Update of molecular biology databases is a growing burden on the biomedical research community. As the grid allows to share and replicate data, we propose a service to automatically update the molecular biology databases from a single changing reference using Web services. In this paper we report the components, the architecture, and the deployment of the update service on the french RUGBI grid infrastructure. RUGBI is a computing grid infrastructure based on existing middleware and technologies for the community of scientists in bioinformatics.