In just one month, gamers playing on Cancer Research UK's new smartphone game, have analysed gene data which would have taken a scientist six months to analyse by eye.

Last month, Cancer Research UK unveiled a smartphone game that it hopes will speed up the analysis of gene data, necessary in research into cancer cures, as people play it.  

Play to Cure: Genes in Space is free to download on the Android and Apple phones.

It has announced today that in just one month its ‘citizen scientists’ have analysed gene data which would take six months to do by eye.

Cancer Research says that if this amount of DNA was unravelled it would stretch for 40 miles, equivalent to the length of more than 540 football fields.

Cancer Research UK’s scientists must decode vast amounts of data to discover cancer-causing genetic faults in order to develop new targeted treatments for patients.

But the human eye is needed to spot patterns in the data – computers aren’t precise enough. And it would take scientists years to do this manually.

But the collective clout of the sheer numbers of gamers across the world have sped this up, and will boost accuracy, Cancer Research UK says.

In just one month, there have been 1.5 million classifications (the DNA of one chromosome) through the game from players in almost every country in world.

And citizen scientists have collectively dedicated more than 53,000 hours – six and a half years – playing the game and analysed around half the data from the first research project.

Hannah Keartland, Cancer Research UK’s citizen science lead, said: “It’s still early days but we believe the collective force of global gamers could have a massive impact and speed up our lifesaving research.”

Professor Carlos Caldas, senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, added: “Computers can’t analyse our research data with 100 per cent accuracy – we need the human eye for greater precision. It can take us years to decode the huge amounts of data generated by research. But with everyone’s help the boost to our work could be enormous.”