Problem
Psoriasis is an inflammatory skin disease affecting over 125 million people globally, incurring annual health care costs of over $135 billion (https://www.psoriasis.org/psoriasis-statistics). It is not a cosmetic problem, and this disease reduces quality of life with a greater impact on women and young.
Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) is a condition causing joint inflammation that affects about 1 in 3 people with psoriasis. Symptoms of PsA include pain, swelling, and stiffness of joints, pain in the tendons, changes in nail thickness or colour, and can also lead to pain and redness of the eyes. Many individuals with PsA experience 'flares', where symptoms may worsen at times and then improve for a period of time. With adequate symptom management, many people living with PsA can lead full and active lives. However, in about 5% of cases, a more severe and destructive form of PsA can develop, causing deformity of the joints in the hands and feet.
Apart from the symptoms, PsA can cause sleep issues, and difficulty moving to accomplish everyday tasks. Symptoms can also lead to self-consciousness and distress for some patients.
Though the cause of PsA is not well-understood, genetics can predispose an individual to PsA, which can then be triggered by environmental factors such as an infection, an accident, an injury, being overweight, or smoking. Currently, there is no cure for PsA, but rheumatologists can help PsA patients manage their symptoms using different drug therapies, such as non-sterioidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), including biological DMARDs in severe cases.
Proposed Solution
In this project, researchers at the Schroeder Arthritis Institute, Canada, are using World Community Grid to analyse a massive amount of data from skin samples from areas with and without lesions in patients with psoriasis or PsA to identify combinations of markers that play a role in the development, progression and treatment of PsA.
While identifying all clinically useful markers would require thousands of patient samples and testing an astronomical number of marker combinations, which would be infeasible even for World Community Grid, the method developed by MCM researchers (https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~juris/jlab/mcm.html) will reduce notably the computational power needed. The algorithm still requires a very large amount of computer processing power, but it would be doable using WCG.
How You Can Help
A World Community Grid volunteer downloads a secure software program to any computer or Android phone. When the device is not using its full computing power, it will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background which will help identify markers of PsA. Then, the device contacts the World Community Grid server to let it know that it has completed the calculation.
World Community Grid receives the results sent back (often called work units or research tasks), combines them with hundreds of thousands of results from other volunteers all over the world, and sends them to the researchers' team that can begin to analyse the data.
Deciding to be a volunteer for this project can accelerate the identification of precious molecular markers to help find better treatments for PsA.