Imagine if you could simultaneously play a game on your smartphone while also doing something beneficial to the world as a whole – like helping scientists in the quest to beat cancer in real life? Thanks to a new app by Cancer Research, described as “the world’s first app designed to unravel genetic data”, anyone with an Android or iOS device can stop dreaming and do just that.
In Play To Cure: Genes In Space, players pilot a ship through a hazard-strewn course across space, blasting asteroids on their way, in an apparent mission to collect a valuable material called Element Alpha. As they play, their movements through the game actively aid research into identifying genetic markers that could help scientists identify cancer-causing genes in actual patients in real life.
Cancer Research scientists recently created graphs representing genetic data from 2,000 anonymous breast tumour patients. These graphs often have abnormalities where some part of the genetic make-up suddenly peaks or drops significantly at isolated points, which Scientists believe could identify potentially cancer-creating genes that could help further research into curing and preventing cancer. The problem is, while computers can pick out some likely problem areas themselves, sometimes the peaks are so subtle they can only be picked up by human eyes; and identifying the specific responsible genes also requires precision – so Scientists still need to look at the graphs themselves as well. The more eyes available, the quicker this process will be; but Scientists know that for most people, looking at graphs all day is plain boring.
So game developers at the company Guerilla Tea worked with scientists on an approach that involves regular people in the research while allowing them to have fun as well. The game developers have transformed the readouts into an intergalactic landscape, where your path and the hazards you face are based on a randomly-decided genetic sample. As your ship moves through the game, you map a path across the graph it was based on; and these movements are tracked by the game.
To ensure accuracy, each section of gene data will be tracked by several different players. The information is fed back to the scientists and as more players highlight the peaks and troughs, scientists identify those areas for further research. The anonymity of the cancer patients used for the study will be preserved, the developers promised.
Every single second gamers spend playing our smartphone game directly helps our work to beat cancer sooner. As you steer your spaceship through Element Alpha you are mapping a path behind you. That path is really useful to the scientists because it will help them to identify where the peaks and the troughs are in the data […] by understanding exactly where those peaks and troughs are, we can understand where to go and look for faults in genes that might be linked to cancer […] With [just a few minutes play per player,] we could have an absolutely mind-blowing impact in terms of accelerating research.
-Hannah Keartland, Citizen Science Project Lead, Cancer Research UK
The app is the second “citizen science” project by Cancer Research UK, after the success of Cell Slider, which was also used to aid Breast Cancer research. More than 200,000 people classified almost two million cancer images, reducing the time taken for researchers to analyse a subset of breast cancer samples from 18 months to just three.
Cool.
