Professor, author suggests ‘gaming cancer’ can help accelerate oncology research
Key takeaways:
- Video games could lead to breakthroughs in cancer research.
- Video games also can be used to improve scientific literacy about cancer among the general population.
As Jeff Yoshimi, PhD, wrote his book about how video games could improve scientific literacy on cancer and generate ideas that could eventually lead to treatments, he proposed this title to his mother: “Curing Disease Using Video Games.”
“My mom gave me what philosophers sometimes call the incredulous stare like, ‘Come on, are you serious?’” Yoshimi, professor and founding faculty member in the departments of cognitive and information sciences and philosophy at UC Merced, told Healio.
Yet, the idea had long been in practice. Citizen science games such as Foldit and Eterna have helped researchers evaluate proteins and RNA in ways they had never thought of. Re-Mission 2 helps children with cancer understand why their therapies are needed.
They are just the tip of the iceberg, Yoshimi said.
In Gaming Cancer, he details how video games could immediately improve understanding of disease and, eventually, make contributions to research.
“Lots of people should be trying to do this on different scales and from lots of different angles,” Yoshimi said.
Background
Yoshimi got the idea for Gaming Cancer as he was in the hospital with his wife, Sandy, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I felt kind of helpless,” he said. “I was like, ‘What can I do?’ I started thinking advances in cancer, and progress on any problem, comes from the human mind coming up with new solutions, with scientists finding new ways to deal with it.
“I’m a cognitive scientist and a philosopher of mind,” he added. “One of the things I do is make visual game-like interfaces to teach things like neural networks. What I could do is work on making minds better at coming up with solutions to problems like disease, like cancer.”
Yoshimi had an “awareness” of citizen science as he began writing his book but, the more research he did, the more value — and opportunity — he saw.
“There are games that people are playing, and researchers are making scientific discoveries through those games,” he said. “But we could build new games that go a lot further, that are a lot wackier, a lot crazier, and in that way improve our chances of finding cures to diseases.”
Citizen science games
Nobel laureate David Baker, PhD, director of Institute for Protein Design and Henrietta and Aubrey Davis endowed professor in biochemistry at University of Washington, and colleagues released Foldit in 2008.
Originally called Rosetta, the program relied on crowd computing to help find ways to fold proteins.
Individuals saw Rosetta on their computers like a screen saver, and many had ideas about how to solve problems Rosetta was working on. Baker and colleagues redesigned the program to make puzzles out of unfolded proteins that anyone could try to solve.
In 2011, Foldit found a solution to a monomeric retroviral protease structure. Gamers have come up with other protein-folding solutions. and their work has been published in multiple medical journals over the years.
Eterna — a similar game that involves RNA structures — also has significantly advanced science, Yoshimi said.
“Those kinds of games tend to be very technical, very puzzle oriented,” he added. “It’s not going to appeal to a lot of people, but they have the virtue of producing actual scientific results because of their narrow focus and their tight integration with real labs.”
Game ideas
Games like Foldit and Eterna produce data that can impact research and lead to development of treatments.
Those are not the only games that can be valuable, though.
In Gaming Cancer, Yoshimi describes the multitude of platforms that could be used to inform the general population — for example, a first-person shooter where an individual is flying through the body fighting cancer, or a strategic game arranging resources in a cell to fight off a malignancy attack.
He discusses a game franchise called Cancer Wars in his book.
“Games in this series pit you against cancer cells — personified as zombies — using a multiscale, open simulation where the player can fashion all kinds of nanoscale weapons and traps, and try to defeat a growing tumor using clever and ingenious means,” he wrote.
“The games wouldn’t necessarily lead directly to a cure, but they will help people see things in new ways,” Yoshimi said of these ideas. “They will help people understand what’s going on in their bodies. All these indirect goods could come out of them.”
‘Ultimate dream’
Yoshimi’s “ultimate dream” would be the development of an engine he dubbed “Simbody.”
It would have bodily simulations on various scales, from the whole body to an organ to a tissue to the cellular level.
With this engine, various research groups could develop their own educational games, or ones with a narrower focus such as Foldit that could be used to solve complex problems.
Games could also integrate AI and use the combined power of citizen science and technology to facilitate advances in cancer research.
“AI is rapidly accelerating But, oftentimes, you watch what the AI is doing and it lacks a certain kind of creative intuition — an ability to see the large-scale problems of the relevance of what’s happening,” Yoshimi said. “It’s more brute force, statistical inference. Balance between the two is what Foldit really pioneered. People would watch the AI optimizer run and make these programmatic changes, and then they would say, ‘I think I could help in this way,’ so you get this human machine symbiosis in the game, like Luke Skywalker and C3PO. Either alone isn’t as good as the two together.”
‘Whole range of possibilities’
As Yoshimi wrote his book, Eran Agmon, PhD, assistant professor at the Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling at University of Connecticut Health Center, proposed an idea of a game that could replicate biological pathway models using circuitry. Agmon has a background in whole-cell modeling, and was inspired by games like Foldit and Eterna to bring gamification to the domain. His idea is that gamers would create hypothetical biological circuits by plugging cords and wires into a circuit in an effort to find better matches to observed data than are possible using AI alone.
However, Yoshimi — describing conversations he had with Agmon — said the game could have a broader reach if presented in a different way.
“It could be spruced up with DJ-style cords and plugs, in the style of a sound-mixing board,” he wrote in his book.
Agmon’s proposal is the type of idea Yoshimi wants to see more of.
Yoshimi understands skepticism, and said he acknowledged the book may not produce the dream results he hopes for, but he believes the idea of games improving knowledge still would amount to a great success.
“There’s a whole range of possibilities,” he said.
References:
- Sleator RD. FEBS Lett. 2024;doi:10.1002/1873-3468.15043.
- Why the battle against cancer needs awesome video games (press release). Available at: https://news.ucmerced.edu/news/2025/why-battle-against-cancer-needs-awesome-video-games. Published Jan. 23, 2025. Accessed Feb. 28, 2025.
For more information:
Jeff Yoshimi, PhD, can be reached at jyoshimi@ucmerced.edu.
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