Together with his colleagues, Rhiju Das, PhD, a biochemist at the Stanford (Calif.) School of Medicine, are looking for a better way to test tuberculosis, according to The Wall Street Journal. To do so, they created the OpenTB challenge through an online video game called Eterna. Players simply have to create a molecule that’s responsive to levels of tuberculosis in the blood.
Do the players have to have any knowledge about TB? Not according to Dr. Das. All the necessary information is included in the game.
Dr. Das and his colleagues then plan to use the molecule designs. “Any molecule that a top player can make in the game, we will test it in the laboratory,” Dr. Das said, according to the report.
The researchers at Stanford aren’t the only ones using crowdsourcing methods to recruit video gamers. Through a game called Phylo, a team at Montreal, Quebec-based McGill University has reached out to 300,000 gamers for help cross-indexing disease-related DNA sequences. At Uppsala (Sweden) University and Stockholm, Sweden-based Royal Institute of Technology, researchers have recruited Eve Online gamers to investigate human cell proteins.
Like OpenTB players, other video gamers being recruited typically have no prior medical experience, according to the report. But Dr. Das sees this as a benefit. “We cannot efficiently find solutions to this puzzle with a computer alone,” he said, according to the report. “We are at the mercy of our players to give us designs that we can test.”
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