EVE Online’s Project Discovery Is Expanding To Cancer Research

It’s been a little over three years since CCP Games announced Project Discovery as a way for Eve Online players to help with COVID-19 research. The project began as a joint effort with scientists from McGill University, BC Cancer, and front-line Covid-19 doctors.

A few months later, in 2020, the developer announced that EVE Online players had analyzed more than 40 million data sets by doing research tasks in the game, marking cell populations on graphs for researchers. Their in-MMORPG work amounted to over 32 years' worth of what would have been done by researchers. By 2021 they had contributed more than 330 years’ worth of research.

Today, CCP is announcing the fourth phase of Project Discovery. The developer is working in conjunction with Massively Multiplayer Online Science to expand the project to “encompass critical immune system diseases, including cancer”.

In order to further expand on the project, CCP also announced a new mobile app that will allow players to take part in Project Discovery via their phones. The app, called Play Science, makes it so that Eve Online players don’t need to be sitting at their computers in order to help with the project.

Finally, Project Discovery’s most recent dataset will be made publicly available. That will help researchers around the world work on breakthroughs.