NewsForge: UNC Makes Profitable Investment in Open Source for Drug Research

“The United States spends about $30 billion annually on
pharmaceutical research and development, and Europe spends about
$20 billion, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturer’s Association. For at least one major university,
Linux has played a big part in making that research more efficient
and cost-effective.

“Computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) is the process of
identifying and testing molecules to determine their effectiveness
in treating symptoms and curing diseases. It’s the precursor to
production of patented pharmaceuticals. CADD is huge business and
hugely competitive, especially since advances in clustering and
grid computing have drastically reduced the time it takes to go
from hypothesis to conclusion. The widespread use of Linux in
multi-CPU operations has greatly reduced the expense…”

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