Print“We hope thousands of people worldwide will play Play to Cure: Genes in Space as often as possible, to help our researchers get through this data, says Hannah Keartland.”
Cancer Research UK is enlisting gamers in its fight against cancer with a new smartphone game designed to help its scientists parse genetic data faster.
The charity's free game, Play to Cure: Genes in Space, challenges players to navigate a spaceship safely through an intergalactic obstacle course, a task that simultaneously provides analysis of variations in Cancer Research UK’s gene data, highlighting genetic faults which can cause cancer.
“Our scientists’ research produces colossal amounts of data, some of which can only be analyzed by the human eye—a process which can take years,” says Hannah Keartland, citizen science lead for Cancer Research UK. “We hope thousands of people worldwide will play Play to Cure: Genes in Space as often as possible, to help our researchers get through this data.”
Scientists at the charity will use the information generated by the game to identify the genetic variations behind particular cancers and develop new drugs that target them, speeding our progress towards personalized medicine. The game is available to anyone using Apple iOS or Android-based mobile phones and tablets.
Each gaming session helps scientists analyze data generated by gene microarrays, a research tool used to look for cancer-linked genetic regions. Microarrays allow scientists to analyze DNA from many thousands of tumor samples simultaneously and find the most frequent changes linked to cancer. Though some scientists are using automated digital image analysis software to tackle microarray data, Cancer Research UK says that often that approach is bested by the pattern-recognizing ability of the human eye.
The format for the new game was developed at Cancer Research UK’s GameJam in March 2013, an event that brought the charity’s scientists together with more than 50 specialists including games technology academics. To ensure accuracy, each section of gene data is tracked by several different players.
As the group’s freshman mobile gaming effort, Play to Cure has drawn some criticism from Apple App Store reviewers for initial bugs leading the game to crash or quit suddenly. Given the rapid pace of most modern mobile software development efforts, those issues are likely to be addressed in future versions.
The game is the charity’s second project to leverage the skill of lay supporters to boost its research. In October 2012, it launched Cell Slider, a crowdsourcing tool intended to reduce the time it takes for researchers to analyze a subset of archived breast cancer samples from 18 months to just three months. So far, more than 200,000 people have used Cell Slider to classify almost 2 million cancer cell images.
Efforts to harness the latent potential of idle minds and spare computing power connected to the internet to amplify scientific efforts have a long history. As mobile gaming continues to grow in popularity, its likely that such constructive play will take on an important role in the advancement of research efforts targeting public health and other public goods.
February 06, 2014
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-the_game_is_on.html
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