Drug design as a video game: A summer program integrating chemical biology and computer science

Virtual drug screening is a rapidly evolving technique which offers great promise for the systematic evaluation of large chemical libraries to identify potential drug candidates. eHiTS Lightning is a commercial drug design software which takes advantage of the Cell Broadband Engine processor present in the video game console Sony PlayStation 3 to greatly accelerate computations. In the summer of 2008, a computational chemistry program for high school students was held at Rhode Island College which incorporated several different modules which combined biology, chemistry, and computer science. One of these modules focused on computer-aided drug design. Here, we describe the objectives, methods, achievements, and future goals of that aspect of the program where a high school student, mentored by a graduate student, used eHiTS Lightning on a Sony PlayStation 3 in order to identify molecules which may be potential cancer therapeutics.