Citizen Science for Cancer

Client: Morten Kallberg, Illumina <mkallberg@illumina.com>

Many people enjoy helping with research by completing simple but satisfying classification and recognition tasks online. Examples include the classic Galaxy Zoo, and recent initiatives such as the BBC Your Paintings Tagger. This project aims to design a similar approach to recognise cancer mutations from gene sequencing data, comparing sequences that are different between cancer mutations and healthy cells from the same person. It is relatively easy for people to spot the difference between actual cancers and false positive mutations - your job is to design an engaging online game teaching people to do this task well, and an infrastructure for collecting and analysing the results from large numbers of volunteers, with appropriate account management, motivation scoring and other features that result in effective citizen science projects.