Called "Play to Cure: Genes in Space", the spaceship game is designed for smartphones and was launched by the charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK), which hopes it will speed up the decoding of data to reveal patterns of the genetic faults that cause cancers to grow and spread.
Travelling in a world set 800 years in the future, players guide a fast-paced spaceship safely through a hazard-strewn intergalactic assault course, gathering along the way a fictional precious cargo called "Element Alpha".
Each time a player steers the ship to follow the Element Alpha path, they also reveal patterns and, unwittingly, provide analysis of variations in the genetic data, explained Hannah Keartland, who led the project for CRUK and unveiled the game at a London launch on Tuesday.
It is this information that will be fed back to CRUK scientists. And to ensure accuracy, each section of gene data will be tracked by several different players.
"We want anyone, anywhere, at any age, to download this game and play it," said Keartland.
If everyone around the world were to play the game for even a couple of minutes each, she said, "we could have an absolutely mind-blowing impact in terms of accelerating research".
An estimated 14 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer each year and that toll is expected to rise to 22 million a year within the next 20 years, according to a World Health Organization report issued on Monday.
Scientists will use the information gathered from "Genes in Space" players to work out which genes are faulty in cancer patients. This in turn should help them develop new drugs that target specific genetic faults, and new ways to figure out how to stop cancer developing in the first place.
"It's not just a game, it's way of saving lives," said Tony Selman, a 72-year-old prostate cancer survivor from Middlesex, central England, who helped launch the new game.
Play to Cure is CRUK's second citizen project following a similar but smaller one last year called CellSlider - which the charity said cut the time needed for researchers to analyze a set of breast cancer samples from 18 months to three months.
Professor Carlos Caldas, an oncologist at CRUK's Cambridge Institute, explained that it works by using data generated by screening tools called gene microarrays - which scientists use to look for areas of the human genome that show up faults in cancer patients - a sign they may be causing the disease.
Gene microarrays are useful for analyzing large genetic faults known as copy number alterations - when a whole section of the chromosome is gained or lost.
Since these large sections of chromosomes may involve many different genes, scientists need a way to work out which are the ones driving cancer - known as oncogenes - and which ones are just "passenger" genes along for the ride, he said.
Scientists generally use computer software to trawl through the huge amounts of data generated by microarrays to spot the precise locations of copy number changes, but in many cases these are not accurate enough.
"Computers are very good, but they are not perfect," Caldas told reporters. "The human eye is still the best technology we have for picking up these patterns, and...Genes in Space is harnessing that power."
What
happens when you mix the wackiness of homeopathy with the
ridiculousness of religion? You get the Matthew 4 Protocol. I don’t know
if you heard, but cancer has completely vanished from the face of the
Earth. No, I haven’t noticed that either. But this morning I got an
e-mail from The Washington Times telling me that the Bible has cured
cancer.The e-mail begins by stating that atheists are speechless and can’t explain this. There is a healing message hidden in the Bible on page 856 of the King James Bible. This of course was an advertisement for a “groundbreaking” book. The e-mail directed me to a website which auto-plays a video explaining how on page 856 of the Bible there is a magical cure for cancer. The video goes on for a while, but never does give you the cure. For that, you have to sign up for the book.
How cruel is this guy? He claims to be able to cure cancer with a simple secret found on a single page of a book almost everyone has or has access too, but he’ll only give it to you if you sign up to his mailing list. In the meantime, you have to suffer and maybe even die. If this miracle cure is so simple that it can be found on one page of the Bible, then you should just come out and say what it is.
Well, I looked up Matthew 4, which is where the cure is said to be located and it talks about fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. So there it is. That must be the magical cure for cancer.
How can I explain away this magical cure? 1. I doesn’t work and 2. People wrote the King James Bible, not God. Even if you are a fundamentalist religious person who believes that God wrote (or divinely inspired) the Bible, human beings translated and published it in the form of the King James Bible.
Oh shit, an atheist just explained it! This “miracle code” is a fraud and it preys on people when they are sick, dying, and desperate. I know that The Washington Times are hard up for advertisers, but bounds of reason here.
The website promotes Dr. Mark Stengler. He is a homeopathic doctor and author of almost a dozen books on homeopathic “medicine.” It seems that all one really has to do to get any attention is to invoke the Bible and then it is no longer a scam, it’s religion!
That is the real Bible Code and that is what Brian Chambers figured out with his book, “The Bible’s Healing Code Revealed.” Well, I have a Bible Code too. Just go to any page of the Bible and it will prove that the Bible is completely fiction! I’ll call it “The Atheist Bible Code Revealed!”
- See more at: http://www.skepticink.com/dangeroustalk/2014/01/27/bible-cured-cancer/#sthash.9JxwmoCc.dpuf
What
happens when you mix the wackiness of homeopathy with the
ridiculousness of religion? You get the Matthew 4 Protocol. I don’t know
if you heard, but cancer has completely vanished from the face of the
Earth. No, I haven’t noticed that either. But this morning I got an
e-mail from The Washington Times telling me that the Bible has cured
cancer.The e-mail begins by stating that atheists are speechless and can’t explain this. There is a healing message hidden in the Bible on page 856 of the King James Bible. This of course was an advertisement for a “groundbreaking” book. The e-mail directed me to a website which auto-plays a video explaining how on page 856 of the Bible there is a magical cure for cancer. The video goes on for a while, but never does give you the cure. For that, you have to sign up for the book.
How cruel is this guy? He claims to be able to cure cancer with a simple secret found on a single page of a book almost everyone has or has access too, but he’ll only give it to you if you sign up to his mailing list. In the meantime, you have to suffer and maybe even die. If this miracle cure is so simple that it can be found on one page of the Bible, then you should just come out and say what it is.
Well, I looked up Matthew 4, which is where the cure is said to be located and it talks about fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. So there it is. That must be the magical cure for cancer.
How can I explain away this magical cure? 1. I doesn’t work and 2. People wrote the King James Bible, not God. Even if you are a fundamentalist religious person who believes that God wrote (or divinely inspired) the Bible, human beings translated and published it in the form of the King James Bible.
Oh shit, an atheist just explained it! This “miracle code” is a fraud and it preys on people when they are sick, dying, and desperate. I know that The Washington Times are hard up for advertisers, but bounds of reason here.
The website promotes Dr. Mark Stengler. He is a homeopathic doctor and author of almost a dozen books on homeopathic “medicine.” It seems that all one really has to do to get any attention is to invoke the Bible and then it is no longer a scam, it’s religion!
That is the real Bible Code and that is what Brian Chambers figured out with his book, “The Bible’s Healing Code Revealed.” Well, I have a Bible Code too. Just go to any page of the Bible and it will prove that the Bible is completely fiction! I’ll call it “The Atheist Bible Code Revealed!”
- See more at: http://www.skepticink.com/dangeroustalk/2014/01/27/bible-cured-cancer/#sthash.9JxwmoCc.dpuf
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