Smartphone video game to speed cancer research with help of 'citizen scientists'


Tech giants Amazon, Facebook and Google are joining forces with a British charity to produce a mobile-based video game designed to accelerate research into cancer-fighting drugs, according to a Reuters report. Led by Cancer Research UK, the video game is envisioned as an app that will enable hundreds of thousands of "citizen scientists" around the world with smartphones to gain access to a tsunami of cancer data in order to help analyze it. "We're making great progress in understanding the genetic reasons cancer develops. But the clues to why some drugs will work and some won't are held in data which need to be analyzed by the human eye - and this could take years," said Carlos Caldas at Cancer Research UK's Cambridge Institute in the article. "By harnessing the collective power of citizen scientists we'll accelerate the discovery of new ways to diagnose and treat cancer much more precisely."  Article