According to Kotaku Sony has decided to close the “folding@home” project with Stanford University at the end of this month. The project lasted five years had 15 million users and over 100 million computation hours have been crunched.

The program, allowed PS3 owners to donate their console’s processor towards crunching scientific data for the university’s Alzheimer’s research team. The project also benefited the fight against cancer and Parkinson’s disease as well.

The man in charge of Folding@home, Vijay Pande, had only wonderful things to say about Sony´s cooperation with the project.

“The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs”, Folding@home’s boss at Stanford, Vijay Pande, told Sony.

“We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer’s disease.”

The next step for Stanford is try to take the compound created and attempt to make it into a viable drug. The findings can not be reported as of yet.

Sony says the ending of the project also means the end of the under-used Life With PlayStation section will be coming off the PS3’s dashboard as part of the console’s 4.30 update due out on Tuesday.