Garvan Institute, Vodafone team up with app to research cancer cure

Can an App cure cancer? Not quite, but a new collaboration aims to fast track the research process.

Can an App cure cancer? Not quite, but a new collaboration between the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Vodafone Foundation aims to fast track the research process.

The DreamLab app, available today on Android phones and coming soon to iOS devices, harnesses the considerable processing power available in smart phones to work as part of a remote supercomputer-like network.

Head of the Vodafone Foundation, Alyssa Jones, says the problem was simple but the solution was far more difficult.

“In talking to Garvan, we found out that one thing that was really slowing their cancer research process and their ability to treat cancer patients and help them live long happy lives was a simple thing, limited access to super computers.”

Once the app is installed, and your phone is charged to at least 95%, DreamLab will launch and download part of the problem set by the researchers at Garvan, sending the results back to be reassembled into an answer. Despite the logistic hurdles including splitting the problem apart, and distributing it to users, this happens much faster than the Garvan Institute’s network of supercomputers currently performs.

“What it does is allow you to solve a tiny piece of the cancer research puzzle and send the result back to the team at Garvan,” Jones said.

Although smartphones might not be very powerful individually, working in collaboration, the results are a significant way for an individual to contribute to cancer research,” says Dr Warren Kaplan, Chief of Informatics at The Garvan Institute.

“What we’ve seen, just with the initial few hundred downloads is that we’re already more than ten times the amount of computing infrastructure that is available to us and that will just continue to grow.

“It’s an exciting opportunity for an individual to engage very, very closely with scientific research.”

Dr Samantha Oakes, a Breast Cancer Researcher at the Garvan Institute, nicknamed “The Terminator”, aims to kill cancer cells that manage to survive treatment.

“The focus of my research is to try and work out the ways in which cancer cells live and don’t respond to therapy. If I can work out the ways in which they do that, I can work out ways of killing them”

Oakes is excited by the possibilities the new infrastructure will provide her and her team.

“The Vodafone DreamLab app will speed up the computing power at the Garvan Institute by 30 times with just 1,000 phones running the application.

“We hope that the app will enable us to just fast pace our research, so the processing is benign. We ask a question of the data and we get the answer like that.”

Jones is bullish on the future of DreamLab, which hinges on whether individuals actually download the app.

“I think Australians should download this app because Cancer most likely will affect someone in your life at some stage, and medical research is the only way that doctors can know how to treat you and make you better.

“So download this app and help medical researchers do their job and hopefully find a cure for cancer.”

The Dreamlab app is available to download now on the Google Play Store. Downloads are unmetered for Vodafone customers and can be limited by the user.