DreamLab is a specialist app, developed by Vodafone Foundation Australia as an easy way for anyone to support cancer research while their phone is on charge overnight. Today, a new Corona-AI project has launched on the app, which will use the same technology to help in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. It is available to download now in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Romania and the UK, with other countries to follow in the coming weeks.*

“We are pleased to offer our DreamLab technology to assist researchers at Imperial College in their work to fight coronavirus,” said Joakim Reiter, Vodafone Foundation Trustee and External Affairs Director, Vodafone Group. “Vodafone Foundation’s award winning DreamLab app has already supported discoveries through cancer research thanks to our customers’ participation, and we want to do our part now as society battles against COVID-19.”

The project combines artificial intelligence and the processing power of idle smartphones to speed up the discovery of novel anti-viral components in existing medicines and help the hunt for anti-viral molecules in foods. The app works by creating a network of smartphones to power a virtual supercomputer, capable of processing billions of calculations, without collecting or disclosing users’ location data. No personal data is downloaded to or processed from the user’s device.

Researchers believe that in the long run this work could speed up access to effective drugs and enable tailored treatments against this infectious disease.

The project is split into two phases:

To identify uses of the existing drugs and food-based molecules with anti-viral properties To optimise combinations of these drugs and food molecules with antiviral properties for improved efficiency against coronavirus infections

While traditional experimental research and standard research methods could take years to develop, the mobile cloud-based processing approach of DreamLab can drastically reduce the time taken to analyse the huge amount of data that exists. A desktop computer running 24-hours a day would take decades to process the data, but a network of 100,000 smartphones running overnight could do the job in just a couple of months.