The smartest and simplest way to honour World Cancer Day

HERE’S an innovative way to honour World Cancer Day and contribute towards cancer research. And it won’t cost you a cent, all you have to do is turn on your smartphone.

phone cancer cures

Today, 14 million new cancer cases are reported each year globally, with that number expected to reach 21.7 million by 2030. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, numbers are forecast to grow from one in 22 Australians with a history of cancer, to one in 18 in 2040 — to almost 1.9 million people.

On Sunday 4 February, World Cancer Day united the world’s population in the fight against cancer. The day aims to stop millions of preventable deaths each year by raising awareness and education about the disease and pressing governments and individuals across the world to take action.

In honour of World Cancer Day, the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and DreamLab are offering an innovative approach to cancer research that everyone can get involved in. It’s so simple you can do it with your eyes closed — in fact, you can do it in your sleep. All you have to do is plug your smartphone into the charger, turn on DreamLab and put your smartphone to work while you sleep.

Built by the Vodafone Foundation in partnership with Garvan, the app works by combining the processing power of smartphones to crunch numbers and compare genetic profiles of tumours.  

The app supports two projects which Garvan is working to solve: Project Decode and Project Genetic Profile. Project Decode focuses on fighting breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancer. Today, calculations on Project Decode are almost complete, with 25 million calculations crunched so far. Project Genetic Profile seeks to understand similarities between lung, melanoma, sarcoma and brain cancer. Users have the option to choose which project they support, and the app is available on iOS and Android.

For Sarah McGoram, the DreamLab app symbolises the innovative ways ordinary Australians can unite to support cancer research. In 1996, when she was 22-years-old, McGoram was diagnosed with Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumours, a rare form of cancer with only a handful of cases known in Australia.

“It takes a community effort to solve this disease and find the cure, and we’re absolutely in a hurry to find it,” she said.

Although it’s not known what triggers the disease — or how to treat or cure it — McGoram says it takes small discoveries to make big steps forward in cancer research.

Australians can help speed up the pace of cancer research by downloading the DreamLab app. Since DreamLab launched it has crunched more than 35 million calculations, thanks to app users. Each project requires specific calculations to be solved. If DreamLab is used for eight hours a night for one month, each user can crunch between 1660 and 4560 calculations, depending on the device, network speed and applications running on the phone.

The greater the number of Australians using the app, the faster data can be processed for cancer research. This means researchers can solve more problems related to finding treatments for cancer in shorter amounts of time.

Just as cancer affects everyone in different ways, everyone has the power to take action to reduce the impact of the disease on individuals, families and communities. According to Cancer Australia, up to 3.7 million lives could be saved each year by implementing resource-appropriate strategies for prevention, early detection and treatment.

Be part of a growing tribe that’s helping find safer and more effective treatments for cancer today.

Originally published as The smartest and simplest way to honour World Cancer Day