Gamers unleash swarms of nanoparticles on tumours

CANCER is nothing to play around with. But a new online game encourages people to do just that, fiddling with swarms of nanoparticles to come up with promising strategies for attacking tumours.

The game, called NanoDoc, trains players on a few basic rules, including the types of nanoparticles in their arsenal and how they swarm through tissue to find cancerous cells. It then lets players try challenges, which feature real configurations of tumour cells, some of which researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for. The idea is that, as crowds of online users chip away at these tough problems, they will find solutions researchers haven't thought of yet, leading to improved treatments.

"We want bioengineers to come in and design the scenarios," says Sabine Hauert, a swarm engineer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who released NanoDoc online last week.

Hauert was inspired by the protein-folding game FoldIt, in which online users help determine the optimal folding patterns of proteins. The difference is that, in playing NanoDoc, citizen scientists are designing treatments for specific tumour scenarios.

Players can adjust a range of variables to design nanoparticles for a particular job – the size of each particle, the number of them in a swarm, the coating on those particles and the dose of drugs they carry. These can be combined to produce a range of effects, including search-and-destroy behaviour, where one kind of particle seeks out a tumour, then signals the location to drug-bearing particles.

Any solutions that NanoDoc players come up with will be verified in computer models, and using swarms of nanobots in a lab, to make sure the particles move efficiently and leave healthy tissues alone. If the simulations are successful, researchers can move on to biological testing.

Aaron Becker, who works on swarm simulation at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says he is looking forward to seeing what will come out of NanoDoc, and adds that it is a great platform for education. "My 4-year-old son Logan was delighted to see those ugly grey tumour cells 'pop' out of existence, and stayed engaged as we completed the tutorials," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Gamers get to work on hard-to-treat tumours"

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog