Charity Teams Up with Software Company to 'Gamify' Cancer

The United Kingdom's largest cancer charity is teaming up with a British software company to develop a game they hope will generate data regarding the causes of cancer.

Cancer Research UK has announced a partnership with an England-based software agency called Guerilla Tea. Their hope is to develop a game they are currently calling GeneGame. By playing it, they hope the public will help analyze cancer data and contribute to determining some of the causes of cancer.

The human touch

One of the reasons for the game development is by using genetics to treat some cancers, researchers have created "terabytes upon petabytes of data requiring analysis" and the quickest, most efficient way to analyze all the data is by crowdsourcing it through gaming. The key is that the data cannot be analyzed by computer – it requires the human eye.

A representative from Cancer Research UK said:

We're right at the start of a world-first initiative that will result in a game that we hope hundreds of thousands of people across the globe will want to play over and over again and, at the same time, generate robust scientific data analysis.

Cancer research in an app

While there are no details on what the game will be like, it will come in the form of a smartphone app. It will likely work in much the same way that Cancer Research UK launched Cell Slider last year, which invited the public to examine and classify breast cancer samples.

GeneGame is set to be released in the United Kingdom sometime in 2013.

Source: MNT