How Does Mining Help Cure Cancer?

Unfortunately, it is still widely believed that the entire crypto world is a scam and only criminals use it. We believe that crypto technologies can help all of humanity. And this article is another confirmation of that.

The Mapping Cancer Markers project is a research project that aims to identify biomarkers that are associated with various types of cancer. To perform calculations, The Mapping Cancer Markers project uses the computing power of volunteers from the World Community Grid.

World Community Grid is a community of users who provide their computing power to solve complex scientific problems and the project was launched in 2004 by IBM. World Community Grid is now running on the open software platform of the University of Berkeley – Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

With the World Community Grid's help The Mapping Cancer Markers project has received a huge amount of computing power. World Community Grid volunteers tested 9 trillion (9,000,000,000,000) candidate lung cancer signatures. On average, the project received 240 years (of one average computer power) per day. This helped to identify 26 new genes that are associated with lung cancer.

One of these genes is the VAMP1 gene. As it turned out, it is strongly linked with smokers with lung cancer. High expression of the VAMP1 gene increases the patient’s survival, so this gene may be a potential marker of lung cancer. At the same time, the researchers added that “hsa-miR-1262, a microRNA specific for former smokers, regulates VAMP1. <…> VAMP1 is a key player in carcinogenesis, and may be involved in a mechanism linked to the hallmarks of cancer.”

How is all this related to mining and crypto in general? In a Bitcoin blockchain, node operators have to make CPU-intensive calculations to prove they are not fraudulent. The classic miner gets a crypto rewards for creating a block. World Community Grid project participants provide their computing power for science and receive rewards in the Gridcoin cryptocurrency (GRC). According to Coinmarketcap, this token, at the time of publication of the article, costs $0.02019.

A similar concept, where the dummy computing of Bitcoin is replaced with something useful exists in  Rosetta and MilkyWay projects. The idea is welcomed by people who blame Bitcoin for useless energy waste. If mining is integrated with useful scientific research, PoW can once more gain the popularity it lost after Ethereum switched to PoS. We continue to Observe.