Features | 08 Apr 2019

DreamLab’s first birthday: Celebrate by switching to Phase 3!

The more people with the DreamLab app installed, the more calculations we can complete to help cancer research…

A lot can happen in 12 months. Don’t believe us? Just look at DreamLab! Built in partnership with the Vodafone Foundation, the app, which uses your phone’s brainpower to crunch data in the fight against cancer, is celebrating its first birthday today (1 May 2019) – and it’s already racked up over 6 million calculations!

But we’re just getting started. DreamLab’s Project DRUGS is now heading into Phase 3, and we need you to make the switch in order to help us continue to crunch the numbers. Here’s everything you need to know…

Snooze for science

With DreamLab installed and your head on the pillow, your phone joins thousands of others in the cloud, computing packages of data that help scientists at Imperial College London test how different drugs and foods affect cancerous mutations.

You can find out loads more about the science behind the supercomputing here, but suffice to say: every smartphone using DreamLab at night really does make a difference.

And with things now in full swing, we need DreamLab superheroes to switch up to Phase 3, where the data sets get even more complex. The calculations in this new phase explore the effects of combinations of chemical compounds, rather than simply looking at the individual effects of a single one.

We’ve begun crunching over 58 million complex data sets for Phase 3, which will lead us towards really meaningful results in our bid to speed up cancer research. And we need your help!

To move to Phase 3, you need only accept the pop-up that shows up in the app the next time you open it. If not, you can tap on ‘Projects’, then select to help power Phase 3.

You may notice calculations running a little slower than usual, but that’s because the data in Phase 3 is much more complicated, and your phone will require a bit more time to work through each data set.

Download DreamLab now
– Do your part the easy way

 

Every little helps, but you needn’t just take our word for it. Dr Kirill Veselkov, Assistant Professor in Computational Medicine at Imperial College, explains:

“We’re ready to take the leap into new phases, where we’ll research effective drug or food combinations in the treatment of cancer. This is a much more complex process and requires even more computing power to crunch tens of millions of calculations – that is why we need smartphone owners to help our research by downloading and using the app each night while they sleep.”