BALANCED Media|Technology (BALANCED) and Complexity Gaming (Complexity), one of North America’s most elite and longest standing esports organizations, have partnered together to announce #WeAreHEWMEN, a new citizen science/crowdsourcing effort to encourage the video game community to donate spare computer processing power to find treatments to fight the COVID‑19 virus. BALANCED, a crowdsourced healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) company that brings purpose to play, has launched the HEWMEN® Cell application, a free secure download that creates a virtual network to process drug discovery data for the COVID‑19 virus. Leading esports team and sponsor, Complexity, is urging the gaming community (including other esports teams, influencers, and video game companies) to support the effort by downloading the HEWMEN cell application.
BALANCED’s HEWMEN (Humans Engaged With Machines via Elastic Network) technology creates a distributed network that processes data-driven problems such as drug discovery and medical research. The HEWMEN Cell application, which uses small amounts of volunteer computers’ unused processing capacity, has integrated BOINC, an open-source software platform used for volunteer resources developed by the University of California, Berkeley. It allows for the virtualizing of servers and applications inside a voluntary grid network and has been widely used with no security issues on millions of PCs. Most recently, the HEWMEN Cell app was used by BALANCED and computational biologist John Wise, Ph.D., of Southern Methodist University’s Drug Discovery Lab for finding co-medications to enhance the effect of chemotherapy in the treatment of recurrent, resistant breast and prostate cancers.
BALANCED, working again with John Wise, will harness the power of the gaming community to have the HEWMEN Cell app process information from more than 200,000 FDA-approved existing medications/compounds against models of the protein and enzymatic functions of COVID‑19 to see which candidates prove most effective at reducing the virus’ pathology. Using these 200K compounds, between 1.5-3 million virtual experiments will be run, simulating attempts to dock compounds to specific locations on the virus. By identifying the compounds with the highest probability of success, the effort will dramatically reduce development cycle time and get new treatments to market faster.
“If there’s one universal truth about gamers, it’s that they’re always looking for their next challenge,” said Robert M. Atkins, CEO at BALANCED. “COVID‑19 is the biggest threat to humanity we are currently facing and there’s no community in the world more engaged online than gamers. This makes them the perfect group to empower to help put an end to the COVID‑19 pandemic. When they hear the call to help, they will answer. It’s the moment they’ve been training for since they booted up their first video game.”
The HEWMEN Cell app can also combine human intelligence with the system’s machine learning by injecting scientific datasets into new or existing videogames. As players interact with the games, they are adding human intuition and insight into the process as they act upon scientific datasets to solve complex problems or help a computer vision algorithm learn to “read” a certain type of image.
In an industry first, BALANCED recently put a medical research project on Twitch Interactive in partnership with Complexity for World of Warcraft’s “Race to World First.” The livestream event invited viewers to become participants by playing BALANCED’s The Omega Cluster within Twitch streams while watching Complexity-Limit, the top World of Warcraft guild in the United States, become the first North American guild to win the “Race to World First.” During the 10-day tournament, participants logged over 900 hours – or 23 40-hour work weeks – playing The Omega Cluster, virtually processing medical compounds for cancer medicines through their gameplay.
“As with ‘Race to World First,’ we’re proud to partner with BALANCED to showcase the power of gaming and esports within our greater global community,” said Jason Lake, Founder and CEO, Complexity Gaming. “We’re grateful to continue working with BALANCED not only to create an engaging new experience but also to be a part of something meaningful as we strive to find a solution to this global pandemic.”
Other BALANCED efforts include the use of its technologies in an award-winning project by Chief Technical Officer Corey Clark, Ph.D., for the Barbara Bush Foundation’s Adult Literacy XPRIZE (2019) and the creation of an Eye in the Sky: Defender game for the Retina Foundation of the Southwest to improve the automation of interpreting Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans used in the diagnosis and treatment of Age-Related Macular Degeneration.
For more information on the project, visit hewmen.com.
