Vijay Pande Built World's Largest Supercomputer To Save People's Lives

When COVID-19 started getting a tighter grasp on our world, researchers and scientists around the world went all in, researching on the origin, construction of the novel coronavirus and finding ways that can take down the culprit that shut the whole world down.

Representational Image: Getty Images

The initial research required immense processing power that only a supercomputer could provide, however, not all research institutes could afford one. To bridge this gap, Vijar S. Pande's Folding@Home came to the rescue and offered supercomputer power to researchers to take down COVID-19 without costing them a dime.

Originating from Trinidad

Vijay Pande, even though of Indian origin, was born and raised in Trinidad, in South America and later made his way to the US.

He completed his high school education in 1988 (from Langley High School in McLean, Virginia) and briefly worked as a game developer and designer for renowned game development firm Naughty Dog -- the makers of Last Of Us and Uncharted franchise -- in the early 1990s for the game Rings of Power which was released in 1991. He was also one of the developers of the renowned game Crash Bandicoot.

Stanford University

Studying physics

Simultaneously, he was also studying B.A. in Physics from Princeton University. Later, he went on to complete his PhD in Physics from MIT, under the guidance of Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, T. Tanaka, and A. Grosberg in 1995.

However, later he developed an interest in distributed computing disease research platform where his research focused on distributed computing and computer-modelling of microbiology. The research is aimed at improving computer simulations regarding drug-binding, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers. And that¡¯s how Folding@Home was born.

Folding@Home

When COVID-19 spread across the world like a wildfire, researchers were trying to better understand how protein folding can help us fight the disease. In case you didn¡¯t know, protein folding is, basically when a protein is made, it usually emerges in the form of a long string. However, for this string to be used by the body, it needs to fold three-dimensionally. The shape that they make is what enters and exits a particular cell.

COVID-19 has proteins with spikes on its surface that get locked on the lung cell, resulting in the virus to spread. One way to stop this is by locking the protein on the virus that prevents it from binding to our cells and making it incapable of infecting it. For this, researchers had to run simulations to see what works in disabling the coronavirus, before going to create the appropriate medication. And for this, one needs a supercomputer to do these simulations at a faster pace.

Vijay Pande¡¯s Folding@Home allowed the whole world to act as a community, where people like you and me could provide our computer¡¯s processing power, along with thousands and millions of others -- delivering supercomputer-like performance minus the cost, and facilitate faster research. And anyone could do this by being at home.

Stanford University

Awards and recognition

In his career, Pande has garnered several awards and accolades for his efforts. In 2002, he was named a Frederick E. Terman Fellow and an award recipient of MIT's TR100. The following year, he was awarded the Henry and Camile Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award.

He was also awarded the Technovator award from Global Indus Technovators in its Biotech/Med/Healthcare category in the year 2004.In 2006, Pande was awarded the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society.

In 2008, he was named "Netxplorateur" of 2008 as well as awarded the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award and became a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

In 2012, Pande received the Michael and Kate B¨¢r¨¢ny Award for developing computational models for protein and RNA. He is also the second person in the world to be awarded both the "Protein Society Young Investigator Award" and "Biophysical Society Young Investigator" award.

Pande is also the recipient of the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, as well as the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Distinguished Chair in Chemistry. He has also received a Guinness World Record for Folding@Home as well as the American Chemical Society Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award.

Forbes

Current role

Currently, Pande is the ninth general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on investments in biopharma and healthcare and serves on the boards of Apeel Sciences, Asimov, BioAge, Citizen, Devoted Health, Freenome, Insitro, Omada, PatientPing, and Rigetti Computing.

However, along with this, he is an adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford University where he also advises the Pande Lab, focused on taking down problems in chemical biology, biophysics, and biomedicine.