August 7, 2006

Scripps and IBM ask for US$0.5 billion for bird flu research

IBM and The Scripps Research Institute are asking the US federal government for 500 million dollars to make Boca Raton a leading centre researching the spread of bird flu.

If approved, the money would take up nearly a fifth of the US$2.3 billion Congress has slated for bird flu next year.  

The Scripps Research Institute is one of the largest US private non-profit institution engaged in the research of bio-medical science. The Institute has become internationally recognised for its basic research into immunology, molecular and cellular biology, auto-immune diseases, virology and synthetic vaccine development.

Computer-maker IBM has also partnered recently with another company in an Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project, hoping to create common interfaces for RFID software.

IBM and Scripps have been collaborating on computer models to track the spread of pandemic flu since mid-February in "Project Check-mate."

Part of the money would contribute towards building an IBM supercomputer in Boca Raton, which would allow scientists to model the spread of the flu using sophisticated calculations.