Game focused on protein folding highlights value to medical gaming

Where gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions, esearchers at the University of Washington are trying to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries, perhaps even finding a cure for HIV.

A new game, named Foldit, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes – key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer's to vaccines. After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they're playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science.

                                                                                                         Seth Cooper. Courtesy: http://www.uscms.org/

Developed by doctoral student Seth Cooper and postdoctoral researcher Adrien Treuille, both in computer science and engineering, working with Zoran Popovic, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering; David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and David Salesin, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, the work was helped by professional game designers provided advice during the game's creation.

"We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by," said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. "Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize."

Proteins, of which there are more than 100,000 different kinds in the human body, form every cell, make up the immune system and set the speed of chemical reactions. We know many proteins' genetic sequence, but don't know how they fold up into complex shapes whose nooks and crannies play crucial biological roles.

Computer simulators calculate all possible protein shapes, but this is a mathematical problem so huge that all the computers in the world would take centuries to solve it. In 2005, Baker developed a project named Rosetta@home that taps into volunteers' computer time all around the world. But even 200,000 volunteers aren't enough.

"There are too many possibilities for the computer to go through every possible one," Baker said. "An approach like Rosetta@home does well on small proteins, but as the protein gets bigger and bigger it gets harder and harder, and the computers often fail. People, using their intuition, might be able to home in on the right answer much more quickly."

Rosetta@home and Foldit both use the Rosetta protein-folding software. Foldit is the first protein-folding project that asks volunteers for something other than unused processor cycles on their computers or Playstation machines. Foldit also differs from recent human-computer interactive games that use humans' ability to recognize images or interpret text. Instead, Foldit capitalizes on people's natural 3-D problem-solving skills.

The intuitive skills that make someone good at playing Foldit are not necessarily the ones that make a top biologist. Baker says his 13-year-old son is faster at folding proteins than he is. Others may be even faster. "I imagine that there's a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see all this in their head," Baker says.

Eventually, the researchers hope to advance science by discovering protein-folding prodigies who have natural abilities to see proteins in 3-D. "Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score," said Popovic. "They can't even explain what they're doing, but somehow they're able to do it."

The game looks like a 21st-century version of Tetris, with multicolored geometric snakes filling the screen. A team that includes a half-dozen UW graduate and undergraduate students spent more than a year figuring out how to make the game both accurate and engaging. They faced some special challenges that commercial game developers don't encounter.

"We don't know what the best result is, so we can't help people or hint people toward that goal," Popovic explained. The team also couldn't arbitrarily decide to make one move worth 1,000 bonus points, since the score corresponds to the energy needed to hold the protein in that shape.

Almost 1,000 players have tested the system in recent weeks, playing informal challenges using proteins with known shapes. Starting this week, however, the developers will open the game to the public and offer proteins of unknown shapes. Also starting this week, Foldit gamers will face off against research groups around the world in a major protein-structure competition held every two years.

Source: http://www.vircolab.com
Beginning in the fall, Foldit problems will expand to involve creating new proteins that we might wish existed – enzymes that could break up toxic waste, for example, or that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Computers alone cannot design a protein from scratch. The game lets the computer help out when it's a simple optimization problem – the same way that computer solitaire sometimes moves the cards to clean up the table – letting the player concentrate on interesting moves.

Eventually, the researchers hope to present a medical nemesis, such as HIV or malaria, and challenge players to devise a protein with just the right shape to lock into the virus and deactivate it. Winning protein designs will be synthesized in Baker's lab and tested in petri dishes. High-scoring players will be credited in scientific publications the way that top Rosetta@home contributors already are credited for their computer time.

"Long-term, I'm hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world's population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game," Baker said. "We're trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research."

Foldit includes elements of multiplayer games in which people can team up, chat with other players and create online profiles. Over time the researchers will analyze people's moves to see how the top players solve puzzles. This information will be fed back into the game's design so the game's tools and format can evolve.

The research is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc., and through fellowships at Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp.



More games health and the emerging trends
Four major emerging trends were identified at the Games for Health conference papers. These include exercise games  or 'exergaming'; video games that help in rehab and therapy; major health care providers taking a games routes and the rise of video games for first responders  and medical professionals.                                              

In rehabilitation and therapy Guitar Hero will be was unveiled. It  is designed to aid arm amputee rehabilitation and Red Hill Studios presented findings about the development of PDWii twith the UCSF School of Nursing, with funding by NIH is helping to aid balance and mobility in Parkinson's patients. Quantifiable results are being used to track patient progress and are being integrated into the patient's overall regime. Results will be used to benefit further innovations in the field of games for health.

For younger patients, Ditto is a  "multi-modal distraction device" designed to control pain and stress among patients undergoing burn and orthopedic medical procedures.        Source: tinyurl.com/63tu4o

“Go for the burn: designing body-movement controlled video games to maximise energy expenditure,” was   researcher Alasdair Thin of Heriot-Watt University's paper. “Active video games, or ‘exergames’ are now widely available due to recent advances in game technology including the development of low cost body-movement sensitive controllers,” Thin writes in his session synopsis. “In order to maximize the potential health benefits of exergaming, there is a clear need to understand what makes a ‘good’ exergame.”Thin and his laboratory conducted a series of experiments over several years into a number of different body-movement controlled video games from a variety of different genres, including martial arts, dance, fitness/aerobic, boxing and fitness/combat. Primary measures included heart rate and oxygen consumption and were intended to assess the level of physical exertion required to play the games.

“The results indicated that the exertional demands of the different games varied from moderate through to vigorous exercise and provide experimental support for active video games having a role in helping to promote and maintain a physically active lifestyle,” Thin notes.  http://mag.awn.com/?article_no=3594

One Games For Health panel will explore how exergaming in gyms and other settings can be used to combine physical activity and fun.  "Zyked"  for example is a set of online and mobile services designed  for working out, or what Xbox Live! is for videogames. Zyked's creator, Tom Soderlund presented the basics behind Zyked and reported on how the  first batch of user tests are going. He also explains how  Zyked intends to work with a multitude of portable devices including digital music players, digital athletic gear and mobile phone platforms.

Interestingly a major U.S. health care insurance company, Humana, is a primary  sponsor of the Games for Health conference, reflecting the medical community's increasing interest in the potential of games. Representatives from several of the largest health insurance plan providers in the United States convened  a plenary session to detail the game-related efforts they've launched to date and their view about what is needed for the future to use games and games technology to solve critical problems in health that they and others  are facing.

A new development is K.I.C.K. (Kid's Interactive Creation Kiosk) a touch screen system and software activity package developed with young children in mind. Initial design of the system was focused on hospital waiting rooms and other similar healthcare settings. Developed by a team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, the project was originally titled "Project ER" and aimed to lower stress for 60,000 children who visited Pittsburgh Medical Centers ER each year.

During the test run, the project gathered considerable research on how to deploy such systems in healthcare settings and will shared this  knowledge during a case presentation of the K.I.C.K. system. In order to see games for health play a greater role in settings where healthcare is delivered, significant hardware and software delivery problems need to be solved.

The rise of games for first responders and medical professionals allowed attendees the opportunity to play with 3DiTeams. Funded by the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), 3DiTeams was developed by Virtual Heroes with Duke University's Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, and lets people interact with a fully 3D simulation of emergency health care environments.

Medical Cyberworlds is a startup in the process of creating an online multiplayer game to train doctors to communicate more effectively with their patients. Dr. Fred Kron, the founder and CEO of the company and Noah Falstein, lead designer presented an update at the conference on the state of the project and discussed the challenging process of encouraging effective collaboration between physicians, academics, and game developers.

Plague
Another  highlight included a presentation by Nina Fefferman of Tufts University over  the "Corrupted Blood Syndrome" content of the World of Warcraft online game. In September 2005, designers and programmers at Blizzard Entertainment created new game content for the  massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft that inadvertently unleashed an in-game epidemic.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Source http://i.treehugger.com/images

Later called the Corrupted Blood Disease, this virtual virus event was well covered in game and technical press but little else about this event and  insights into what it might offer to epidemiologists has been presented.  Fefferman presented her work looking into the Corrupted Blood Disease as an epidemiological event, coveringwhat knowledge of the event exists outside of Blizzard, and based on interviews with Blizzard. Not the first game-based epidemiological event in a game or virtual world, theevent is one of the most famous and interesting to date and provides an outline of the roles games can play in improving our understanding and possible responses to such events in the future.

Source: http://www.gamesforhealth.org/archives/2008_02.html
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Web: http://fold.it/
Source: http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main/
Web: http://www.sls.hw.ac.uk/staffDetails.php?staff_id=44
Webs: www.guitarhero.com/
http://www.zyked.com/
http://electricowlstudios.com/products.html
http//www.virtualheroes.com/healthcare.asp
http://www.medicalcyberworlds.net/ (under construction)
http://www.blizzard.com