20 October 2012

Games Help Cure Cancer?

More than one in three people in the UK are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Researchers Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Dundee Universities combine biomedical science, complex computing and interactive animations to create better models for predicting cancer and drug behaviour. Their work creates interactive models that show cell signalling pathways and biomolecular species levels, allowing the impact of changing of doses of different combinations of drugs to be predicted.


The interactive models function like a living map, letting mathematicians and biologists work more closely together. Any drug interventions show system-scale, knock-on effects – just as if a line was closed on the London Tube, re-routing passengers on to other lines. By visualising what cancer cell pathways look like, and predicting how they interact with different drugs in real time, they hope to improve this area of crucial scientific research. The next step is to create an interactive tool to simulate 1 million biologically plausible cells and its evolution over a six month period.

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