DreamLab
An app that fought Climate change, Covid-19 and cancer whilst we slept.
Time to say goodbye
We would like to thank all the members of the DreamLab community. We are incredibly proud of what you helped us to accomplish through citizen science over the past 10 years.
Despite huge achievements, thanks to you lending your smartphone computing power to good causes, we have seen the need for an app like DreamLab decline. So we have made the difficult decision to close the app.
From 2nd April 2025, DreamLab will no longer be available and will be removed from Apple and Google play app stores
A legacy of research breakthroughs
A specialist crowdsourcing app developed by Vodafone Foundation, DreamLab accelerated scientific research by using the processing power of dormant smartphones while users charge them at night.
With 3.7 million downloads worldwide, DreamLab created a network of smartphones equivalent to a virtual supercomputer, capable of processing billions of calculations without collecting or disclosing any users’ data.
DreamLab’s innovative approach led to significant breakthroughs in various fields of research, including:
- Research led by the Garvan Institute, which found a new way to cluster cancers together, potentially indicating the best treatment for each one.
- Collaboration with Imperial College to analyse billions of combinations of existing drugs and food-based molecules to identify previously unknown cancer-beating properties. These results were published in Scientific Reports, a Nature Family Journal (available here ), accompanied by a cookbook to popularise these discoveries (available here )
- The launch of ‘Cell Identity Hunter’ with the AIRC, which helped cancer researchers to track and target tumour cells.
- Contributing to cancer and then later COVID-19 research by combining AI and mobile supercomputing to search for licensed drugs and phytochemically rich “Hyperfoods” against COVID-19. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal of Human Genomics (available here ), alongside a cookbook designed to popularise these antiviral scientific discoveries (available here ).
- DreamLab also supported Long COVID research.
- Together with Imperial College’s Grantham Institute, DreamLab modelled the impact of climate change on cyclones and extreme weather, leading to the creation of the world’s most detailed open tropical cyclone maps.
These research breakthroughs wouldn’t have been possible without the millions of people who used the app, playing a vital part in citizen science.
How to stay up-to-date with programmes
We know many Dreamers took a keen interest in the research. The ongoing projects will be transferred to our partners at Imperial College. Follow their progress:
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