BLADDER cancer is the seventh most common cancer in the UK, but you can help make a difference to people’s treatment rates by downloading an app on your phone or tablet.

The app is a game called ‘Reverse the Odds!’ and asks players to undertake a simple scoring task.

Oxford Mail:

 Dr Martin Christlieb

The scores you generate will be combined with other people’s scores and sent to scientists at Oxford University, who will use what you’ve put in as part of their research into bladder cancer.

What do I mean by a scoring task? Well, can you see the blue dots in this picture? Can you see what percentage of the dots are coloured blue rather than orange? Could you tell me whether that blue colour looks faded or is intensely coloured? That’s it. It’s a simple but vital task.

Our top stories

How can these pictures help someone with bladder cancer? The answer lies in the nuts and bolts of how cancer cells work. You are looking at cells in this picture. Our bodies are made up of trillions of tiny, self-contained living cells, which work together in teams to keep us healthy.

When cells stop working in a team we develop cancer.

The blue dots in this picture show how the cells have gone wrong, resulting in bladder cancer in this case. When people get cancer, individuals respond differently to the disease.

If we want to improve our treatments we need to know more about what’s different in each individual’s cancer and tailor the treatment accordingly.

Dr Anne Kiltie and her team at the Department of Oncology at Oxford University, where I work, are the people behind the game. They have discovered that bladder cancers all contain a slightly different cocktail of chemicals, called proteins, which help the cell repair the damage that radiotherapy causes.

In the picture the blue colour signifies one protein that helps repair cancer cells.

Anne is confident that if we were able to measure the amount of each repair protein in a tumour we would be able to give patients a better idea of how effective radiotherapy will be for them as an individual. This would arm patients with more information for making the difficult choices about what treatment is right for them.

Anne and her team are confident that they have the right idea, but they have to prove it. That’s where you, the potential game-players, come in.

Proving it means analysing lots of different proteins in lots of different patients.

Computers can’t do this kind of analysis, which is why Anne needs your help as her team can’t get through all the millions of images on their own.

Download the app and by playing the game you can send in up to 200 analyses of the dotty images. We just need 90,000 people to play in order to make the difference to research helping to treat people with bladder cancer more effectively.

The app is free and available from Google Play, iStore, and Amazon – just search for ‘Reverse the Odds’ and download the game.


  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.