Two years ago, FoldIt made headlines, lots of them, when players of the online protein-folding video game took three weeks to solve the three dimensional structure of a simian retroviral protein that is used in animal models of HIV, but whose structure had eluded biochemists for more than a decade. Seth Cooper, the game’s co-creator, captured the attention of the crowd at the TEDMED medical technology conference in Washington, DC by recounting how thousands of players competed in that FoldIt challenge despite the lack of prize money or prestige. He even brought on-stage the winner, a beaming British lab technician named Mimi Minet whose identity had not been previously disclosed to the public.

But the hidden news, the ‘Easter egg’, so to speak, was that Cooper and his collaborators are updating FoldIt to leverage the power of online gaming to create new proteins—enzymes that could form the basis of novel drugs or improve how they are manufactured. This freshly expanded enzyme design platform for FoldIt saw initial success in January, when gamers using an early version created a blueprint for an enzyme that lab tests indicate speeds up a type of biosynthetic reaction used in the production of a variety of drugs—including the cholesterol medication lovastatin—by almost 2,000%.

“We’ve moved beyond just determining structures in nature,” Cooper, who is based at the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science in Seattle, told Nature Medicine. “We’re able to use the game to design brand new therapeutic enzymes.” He says players are now working on the ground-up design of a protein that would act as an inhibitor of the influenza A virus, and he expects to expand the drug development uses of the game to small molecule design within the next year.

Designing small molecules, which are not composed amino acid chains as proteins are, but still function according to their 3D folded shape, requires that Cooper and his team in Seattle add to the chemical building blocks available to FoldIt players. “To build proteins, players can swap out amino acids in a protein,” he explains, “and there are only 26 amino acids, so compiling the building blocks players will need is easy.”

For example, players can swap a tryptophan for a cysteine in the active site of a potential flu inhibitor and see how it changes the protein’s stability and its interaction with target proteins on the surface of the flu virus. But in order to design small molecules, FoldIt will need a new toolbox of organic subcomponents such as rings and chains of carbon that players can then piece together into larger molecules, adding functional groups like alcohols or sulfurs to create novel small molecule chemicals. Since there the number of organic subcomponents is virtually infinite, creating such a library is daunting, but “we’re hopeful that we’ll have a small molecule in the next year,” says Cooper.

A recent Nature Medicine opinion article that called on the UK to fund more research opportunities for medical students resonated thousands of miles away. Pakistani medical students are now also asking their government to put more money toward educating young physician-researchers.

The need for funding support is, in part, a by product of substantial interest in such training. Since its founding in January 2011, the Pakistan Medical Students’ Research Society (PMSRS) has quickly swelled to more than 500 members. “Two years ago there was very little guidance for students, and opportunities for students to actually conduct research were basically nonexistent,” says Akhtar Amin, president of PMSRS and a third year medical student at Dow University of Health Sciences in Karachi. “Our organization is helping to change this, but we need the financial support of our government.”

In the past two years PMSRS has focused primarily on organizing free symposia on topics related to research careers, such as manuscript writing, presenting scientific data, experimental design and bioinformatics. They say the 17 symposia given so far have attracted more than 800 students, some of whom are located remotely and watch the presentations as internet broadcasts.

Those medical students based in Karachi are also paired by the organization with research mentors. “Funding would allow us to expand the mentor program,” says PMSRS adviser and research mentor Asif Qureshi, a physician and research associate at Dow University of Health Sciences. Qureshi notes that only 80 students have been paired with research mentors, in part because lack of resources makes it difficult to get the word out.

The organization’s primary domestic target for future funding is the Pakistan Medical Research Council, which is the country’s equivalent to the US National Institutes of Health. But the PMSRS also hopes to look outside its borders to make international resources available to Pakistani medical students. “We recently organized an online course collaborating with Indian medical students,” says Qureshi, who says such partnerships with countries where biomedical research is highly funded will be fruitful for students in his homeland.

To that end, he hopes that in the future PMSRS will be able to provide travel grants for Pakistani students doing research fellowships in the US and elsewhere. “Studying research abroad gives a big boost to students,” says Amin, who says he has been accepted to a summer research program at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore this summer. “We need more money to help make those connections.”