Your computer can help to find cures for life threatening diseases. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bloomberg Bootcamp. It's a program that was launched at the beginning of this month... ..and already, hundreds of thousands of computers owners have signed up to take part. Intel is spearheading the effort to use peer to peer technology... to assist medical research. Intel's Daven Oswalt...

"The first project that we launched was a leukemia research project with Oxford University and the National Foundation for Cancer Research and the American Cancer Society. And this project, basically, helps analyze proteins in cancer research. So it's a quite extraordinary program."

The concept is similar to the SETI at home project... where you can download software to use your idle computing time in the search for signs of life from space... .

"Anyone that owns a PC that's connected to the Internet would download the screensaver from Intel.com/cure, the screensaver runs in the background, and it basically uses your idle computing power. Most of your PCs are not utilizing all of the power at any given time and so the program uses the processing power and acts as a screensaver and that screensaver is actually conducting research."

The idea is to get millions of PCs to work together as a supercomputer. Other projects on tap include research into Parkinson's disease and diabetes. Bootcamp, I'm Fred Fishkin, Bloomberg Radio.