Genes in Space
Genes in Space

Mod your spacecraft, career through space, smash asteroids with your laser beam and contribute towards cancer research. These are four things you can do on the morning commute now, after the launch of Play to Cure: Genes in Space on Android and iOS.

The free game is Cancer Research UK's second crowdsourcing collaboration with the Citizen Science Alliance after the success of Cell Slider in 2012, which looked at how breast cancer cells respond to treatment. 200,000 people logged on to play that game, resulting in the classification of two million cancer images, six times faster than it would have taken a team of scientists. Now, they want to see engagement numbers soar with a game that's accessible, fun to play and mobile, but most importantly helps the public sift through and analyse the vast amounts of data gathered by Cancer Research UK scientists.

"Cell slider was incredibly exciting and we saw the potential impact was absolutely huge," Hannah Keartland, Cancer Research UK's citizen science lead, said at a press conference announcing the launch. "We asked ourselves, can we do something more ambitious, something that's never been done before? We saw how many people were playing mobile phone games and set ourselves the challenge of tapping into the mobile gaming market."

The game's dataset comes from 2,000 breast cancer patients who had their genome analysed using microarrays, delivering more than two million data points per patient that reveal where chunks of the chromosome had been lost or gained. It's an epic chunk of material to analyse. The patients had been involved in a 2012 study that revealed breast cancer should never be thought of as one disease, but ten separate diseases. What the team wants to find now are incidences where their genes acted as the brakes or accelerators of a particular cancer -- recognised as the gains or losses in the chromosome, or peaks and troughs in a chart. The breast cancer genes BRCA1 and 2, for instance, act as the cancer cell's brakes' and stop them from multiplying. If these are mutated or underactive, the cancer is left to spread. Alternatively accelerator genes, known as oncogenes, could be over overactive and cause it to multiply out of control.

Genes in Space
Genes in Space

"We inherit two gene copies and cancer cells disrupt these two ways," explained Carlos Caldas, senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge. "They either gain copies to accelerate cells to divide, or lose them when they are the 'brake' of the cell -- losing the brake means it can grow faster. We need to effectively count at each of the gene spots whether a gene has gained or lost copies."

What the team hopes to get from the game are "more refined definitions of these accelerators and brakes". A computer could recognise general peaks and troughs; a human will spot the fragments, the minor iterations and recognise emerging patterns. 

"Data is hiding yet more discoveries -- amazing computers miss new supernovas or stars that can be discovered by geeks who look at the data. There's a chap in Australia who gets up in the middle of the night and discovers more supernovas than all those found with computers, ever -- more new objects in the sky that have been missed by computers," said Caldas.

Genes in Space
Genes in Space

The question was, how to get that much data to translate into a game that's scientifically accurate and helpful, but engaging to play. Last March, Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services took part in a 48-hour hackathon to devise such a game and, although we're sad to report one iteration that featured an asteroid-mining granny was shelved, a final concept was decided upon and taken to Scottish games developer Guerilla Tea. The collective weaved the data into the game seamlessly.

Genes in Space begins 800 years in the future, in a world where the element Alpha is critical for medical research. You need to harvest as much as possible, but will encounter asteroids and other obstacles along the way. Start the game by picking your spacecraft style and modifying it, then you'll be taken to a map of the surrounding universe which shows where the Alpha is -- plot a route that follows regions where the element is most dense, and begin. With this latter part, you have already helped identify where the most important changes are in those peaks and troughs -- the genome is represented in your map. When the game launches and you steer around obstacles to grab the Alpha, each switch left and right delivers a more precise map of where those peaks and troughs are again: the journey you make through space, is in fact a journey through peoples' chromosomes.

"You're looking for the gene copy numbers -- you map precisely where those breaks are, then we map that back to the genes," said Caldas. 

Occasionally you'll encounter "asteroid hell" and as you go through the game you'll get ship upgrades like more power or defenses, till you reach legendary status. But none of these things relate to the science. The Cancer Research UK representatives warn that at first players might find it tricky, but the point is to keep trying -- they need as many people playing as many times as possible to get reliable results. 

The game is the perfect example of how the sciences can benefit from collaborations with the tech industry. Already Zooniverse has gained a prolific following of aspiring exoplanet-hunters. And the Cancer Research UK team truly believes these kinds of methods can be adapted to help get us to better, more personalised treatments, far quicker. Right now they're going through the substantial analysis gained from the Cell Slider project -- they already know it sped up the process dramatically, but want to quantify that gain. 

Cancer Research UK's citizen science ambassador, 72-year-old Tony Selman attended the press conference to remind everyone why this work is so important. The prostate cancer survivor relayed the story of his wife Marian's 30 year battle with cancer. She beat the disease several times, but succumbed to it shortly after Tony himself fell ill with prostate cancer. 

"It's a bit of a sad story if you take it as it stands," said Selman. "But a few positive things came out of it. If it had not been for work done by Cancer Research and other organisations, Marian would not have lasted 30 years, seen her children grow up and grandchildren arrive. The research done by Cancer Research UK changes people's lives, it changes them radically. If it were not for their work I probably wouldn't be standing here this morning -- many of the drugs that helped me also came from the stables of Cancer Research UK.

"People like me that continue to defy cancer are only able to do so because of the effort of people like those from Cancer Research. The problem they have is that research is slowed down -- because of a shortage of funds but also as they become more expert at understanding what cancer is, how it works and how we can interfere, we generate much more data and to process that requires manpower that Cancer Research UK does not have."

If the game is successful, the team plans on feeding in other datasets from different cancers. But until then, they need as many people dodging asteroids as possible.

"It brings forward the day we can beat cancer at its own game," said Selman. "But it's not just a game; it's a way of saving lives."


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