Amazon, Facebook, and Google Join Forces to Aid Cancer Research

Three major companies; Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) are contributing people and resources for an exciting new initiative to help cure cancer using a mobile app. Similar in concept to the web-based game Cell Slider, this new mobile app will “help cure cancer through gamification of cell analysis,” reports The Register.

Forty programmers, game specialists, and computer engineers are gathered at the East London Googleplex this weekend to work on this latest app that will allow users to contribute to the development of a cure for cancer. The mobile game app is tentatively title “GeneRun” and will allow users to aid cancer research by collectively analyzing some of the huge amount of gene data collected by cancer researchers in the UK.

Amazon has offered free cloud-hosting services as the game is developed. Facebook has contributed an engineering team for the weekend, while Google is hosting the GameJam event at its London Googleplex. The effort is also backed by the Citizen Science Alliance, a coalition of groups that promotes collective data-analysis to help solve large-data research problems.

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