Videogame technology offers insights into cancer research

Graphics technology utilised by the videogames industry is helping to provide researchers in the US with valuable new insight into how cancer develops in the human body.

Wake Forest University is employing graphics processing units (GPUs) of the sort used in modern gaming consoles to create simulations of a critical RNA molecule in the human telomerase enzyme, found only in cancerous cells.

This study has shown hidden states in the folding and unfolding of this molecule for the first time, providing a more accurate view of how it functions, as well as showing how drugs could be used to halt these processes in order to kill the tumour cell.

Biophysicist and computer scientist Samuel Cho said the use of the gaming GPUs has allowed him to create simulations in a few months that would have taken decades to create otherwise.

"If it wasn't for gamers who kept buying these GPUs, the prices wouldn't have dropped and we couldn't have used them for science," he added.

Last year, a University of Washington study used a specially created online videogame to leverage the analytical power of gamers to decode the structure of a retrovirus enzyme.