Nicknamed “breakbone fever,” illnesses caused by the dengue virus are not only as painful as they sound, but also occur in hundreds of millions of people per year, killing about 20,000 annually. By using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, however, a research team at Colorado State University is one step closer to preventing the replication of the disease – which currently has no cure — in the human body.
For three decades, scientists have known that the dengue virus survives due to replication of an enzyme called NS3, found in the dengue virus. But until now, no one has been able to find “binding sites” where drugs can influence the enzyme and inhibit genome replication to prevent the virus from making copies.
