Your smartphone can help cure cancer while you sleep
Source: Hannah Francis
Let your phone do the work while you sleep. Photo: Vodafone Foundation Australia
If you were able to help find a cure for cancer without lifting a finger, it would be a no-brainer, right?
Well now you can, thanks to a new Android app created by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, and Vodafone Foundation Australia, which funds health and well-being projects that use mobile technology.
Two years in the making and with the help of Melbourne app developer b2cloud, DreamLab harnesses unused capacity in your smartphone while you're sleeping to crunch medical data for cancer research.
The researchers are hoping to get 100,000 users signed up in the first year, which would allow them to process data around 3000 times faster than they currently are, and complete their first phase of research into four cancers: breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic.
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They're building a massive library that will compare cancers based on genetic profiles rather than tissue type, for example breast and prostate, to help match drugs with patients more effectively.
"Pancreatic cancer, for example, is one of the nasty ones with a survival rate over five years of 5 per cent," said the head of Vodafone Foundation Australia, Alyssa Jones.
"But if your pancreatic cancer looks more genetically like a breast cancer it may respond better to a breast cancer drug based on the genetic profile."
When a phone with the DreamLab app installed is fully charged (95 per cent) and plugged in, the app will automatically download data and analyse it using an algorithm, before uploading it back to the researchers via the cloud. The app uses a technique called "distributed computing" inspired by the open source platform BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) to harness the combined power of thousands of small computers, effectively turning them into a supercomputer.
Users can dedicate 50MB, 250MB, 500MB or 1GB of data a month to DreamLab, depending on whether they are using mobile data or are connected to Wi-Fi. For Vodafone customers, mobile data used up by DreamLab is free.
50MB a month on your mobile network was equivalent to uploading 25 photos to Facebook, Ms Jones said.
Dr Samantha Oakes, who heads the breast cancer unit at the Garvan Institute, said she was hopeful "game-changing" technology like DreamLab would lead to cures for certain types of cancer in our lifetimes.
"As a nation who loves their smartphones, we now have a tremendous opportunity to put them to good use and help find a cure for cancer," she said.
Medical research is increasingly turning to very powerful computers which can analyse vast amounts of medical data to solve problems in new ways.
Ms Jones said there were obvious cost benefits to the Garvan Institute because the app would free up its existing computing resources to be used for other research purposes.
"Medical research grants don't always cover equipment or operational costs," she said.
Vodafone may look at expanding DreamLab to other areas of research, she said.
"Big data is the future for medical research ... the potential is almost unlimited."
The BOINC platform which inspired DreamLab was originally created for a more curious pursuit: a 1999 Berkeley project called SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), which harnessed collective computing power to sift through data picked up by radio telescopes in the hunt for alien life.
The technology has been used for various other medical research projects, but has largely been confined to PCs or gaming consoles rather than smartphones.
Oxford University researchers have used it to help fight smallpox and for cancer research, while Stanford University's Folding@Home project looks at protein folding, which is relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer. It has had as many as 5 million participants at once, and has resulted in dozens of peer-reviewed academic works.
Smartphone manufacturers HTC and Samsung have also developed apps that use distributed computing for research.
Last month, eccentric internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom proposed to build an encrypted internet powered by unused capacity on smartphones and other devices.
DreamLab for Android can be downloaded on the Google Play Store. It is not yet available for iPhone or Windows Phone.
Note: This article has been updated to clarify that DreamLab is a custom built app and does not use the BOINC platform.
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