DreamLab is a multi-award winning app from the Vodafone Foundation, in partnership with Imperial College London, that uses the collective power of mobile phones to fast track cancer research. Cancer is one of the biggest causes of premature death worldwide, finding answers and treatments through medical research is vital and DreamLab gives ordinary people the extraordinary chance to save lives. DreamLab exists to help find answers quicker and the more people who use DreamLab, the faster it works.
Medical research currently generates huge volumes of health data around the world every day, but access to computing power to crunch and make sense of this data is limited. Your mobile device contains a huge amount of computing power needed to run everything from email to music and video streaming apps, but is mostly dormant while you plug it in to charge overnight. DreamLab harnesses this processing power, of yours and thousands of other mobile phones, to examine such health data to look specifically at how existing drugs can be repurposed to help in the fight against cancer.
DreamLab taps into this invaluable resource to find more effective combinations of drugs that can be tailored to patients to improve treatments and save lives. As a Dreamer you can even choose which type of cancer research to support - breast, ovarian, prostate or pancreatic - and also select how much mobile data the app uses every month. Just one PC running 24 hours a day would need 300 years to process the data required to complete the project. However, 100,000 smartphones running DreamLab for six hours a night could fast track the job in just three months.
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