Let’s face it, most of our smartphones can barely last a day of charge, let alone two, so you often have to charge your phone overnight to have enough power for the next day.

Vodafone has an ingenious way to get your phone to multi-task during this charging period, through an app that harnesses the processing power of your phone to help with cancer research.

The app is called DreamLab, and was developed by the Vodafone Foundation.

How can an app fight cancer?

Thousands of smartphones work together overnight to form a virtual supercomputer, which can allow calculations to be crunched faster than a normal computer could work. The collaborative power analyses existing cancer research data, which can speed up research by decades.

The more people using the app, the quicker the research is conducted.

The research in question is being conducted by Imperial College and focuses on cancer drugs. Project DRUGS, as its called, wants to make better use of existing drugs and find more effective combinations in order to improve treatments.

Each problem crunched on the app is an AI-simulated “trial” of how effective a particular combination of existing drugs or food-based molecules is against a specific network of cancer genes. Hundreds of millions of calculations are required to come up with treatments that have a good chance of working.

Over time, the continued use of the app could help lead to tailored treatments for patients.

Speaking about the app, Dr Kirill Veselkov, assistant professor in computational medicine at Imperial said: “Thanks to our people-powered supercomputing through DreamLab, we have completed our first project phase which has found individual drug combinations that are tailored to patient genetics. We have also identified promising drug candidates for further study.

“Now, we are ready to take the leap into the next phases where we will research effective drug or food combinations in the treatment of cancer. This is a much more complex process and requires even more computing power to crunch tens of millions of calculations - that is why we need smartphone owners to help our research by downloading and using the app each night while they sleep.”

How does the app use my phone's processing power?

Your phone will still charge when the DreamLab app is running so when you wake up in the morning, you can unplug and be ready to go.

The app will access some information about you, such as age, gender, your operating system and time spent using the app, so Vodafone can understand the different types of people using DreamLab. It will be anonymous and de-idenitfied, but if you don't want DreamLab and Vodafone to see this information about you, you can opt out of it via your device settings on iPhone or in the app settings on Android.

If you have an Android device, the app will request access to photos, media, and file permissions in order to temporarily store the tiny research problems whilst they are being processed and solved by the phone. DreamLab will only access the files it has created in the files directories.

Vodafone says the app doesn't need to access any of your personal data or photos to be able to solve these tiny research problems.

If you want to read more about the terms and conditions and privacy around the app, check out the DreamLab privacy notice.

Who can download the DreamLab app?

Anyone can use the app regardless of if they are on the Vodafone network or not. It can be used for free on WiFi, or non-Vodafone customers can donate how much data they want to be used for it. The app will not eat into data allowances for Vodafone customers.

Already, nearly 74,000 people have download DreamLab, allowing 5.9 million data calculations to be crunched. This is the equivalent to a desktop computer running 24 hours a day, for 50 years.

Imperial’s scientists estimate that if 10,000 people download DreamLab on World Cancer Day (4 February), this could lead to 100,000 additional calculations, which could lead to crucial progress in the research and ultimately help people living with cancer.

Helen Lamprell, trustee of the Vodafone Foundation said: “DreamLab is a revolutionary project– it’s a completely different, easy and direct way that people can help cancer research. The work done so far has resulted in scientists at Imperial College making some potentially life-changing progress.

“We need as many people as possible to download the DreamLab app on World Cancer Day so that, together, we can really make a difference.”

DreamLab isn’t the only app that can contribute to medical research. The game Sea Hero Quest was developed by scientists in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK to help researchers understand how our brains navigate space, which in turn is contributing to research into Alzheimer’s.

Play a game and help medical research? It’s a win-win all around.

Download DreamLab on iOS or Play Store now