Image credit: Stall Catchers Game
In my previous post Citizen
Science Games Speeding Up Alzheimer’s Research, I covered the first
citizen science project to fight Alzheimer’s disease (AD) - EyesOnALZ.
Created by Human Computation Institute (HCI), together with
collaborators at Cornell, Berkeley, and Princeton, and with support from the BrightFocus Foundation, this project has enabled everyone
to contribute to AD research and speed up drug discovery.
Stall Catchers, their first game and the main activity of the
project, is celebrating 2 years birthday in October 2018. It is a citizen
science application designed to search the brain for stalled blood vessels that
may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. While playing the game, you’ll be
looking at real movies of a live mouse’s brain. You will be given one vessel to
annotate per movie, and will do so by searching for signs of blood flow or
stalls.
Image credit: Stall Catchers Game
According to the Gadgette today’s post, “you can now play that Alzheimer-busting game
on your phone. The mobile app is free
on Android, and while an iOS version is on the way, Apple
fans who would like to contribute to the future of science can get practicing
on the web version meanwhile.”
Image credit: Gadgette
Here is the Gadgette’s pitch:
“Citizen Science doesn’t have the budget or the
advertising power of the big game companies, but time playing this game on the
bus isn’t wasted. You’re actively contributing to a cure for something that
taints countless lives.”
“Analyzing the amount of data required to get
closer to a potential Alzheimer’s drug is a huge task that would take decades.
And we don’t have decades. The original Stall Catchers web game — which has amassed more than 12,000 players — can
analyze data in an hour that would take a week in the lab.”
“The more people who play, the faster we’ll get
the research done. And the faster we do the research, the closer we bring the
cure — to the point that someone playing Stall
Catchers may well be contributing to the development of a drug they take
themselves one day.”
“As of last
week, Stall Catchers players are
using a new dataset, the first to specifically examine a molecular pathway that
might make a good target for a drug treatment. Coming directly from Cornell’s
Schaffer-Nishimura Lab, the data
could help us figure out why blood stops flowing in the brain, and what we can
do about it.”
Image credit: Cornell’s Schaffer-Nishimura Lab
Jurriaan van Rijswijk from Games for Health
explains the big plan:
“Our aim is to reach 1 billion people globally
within 5 years with Serious Games and apps in order to contribute to their
happiness and wellbeing. Stall Catchers
is a unique opportunity to achieve this, since fighting dementia already
contributes to happiness and ultimately, if it eventually helps prevent
dementia.”