Good news: You no longer have to choose between spending all your time playing video games and trying to cure cancer.

In 2013, researchers from Cancer Research U.K. turned to an advertising company with an innovative idea: create a smartphone game that could help find a cure for cancer.

It’s not as weird as it sounds. One of the biggest hurdles that cancer researchers face is the immense amount of time it takes to analyze lab samples. Looking for cancerous genes amidst hundreds and thousands of over genes is a tedious task that takes hundreds of hours. Nor is it something that a computer program is yet able to do with a great degree of accuracy. That’s where the repetitive (but fun) activities of video games comes into play.

In March 2013, Cancer Research U.K. organized the GameJam conference. Developers from Amazon, Facebook, and Google showed up to brainstorm a concept for a game that would be both fun to play and enable players to scan samples. They kicked around a few ideas before deciding that a sci-fi theme would be the best fit.

Introducing Play to Cure: Genes in Space. In the game, players zip around the galaxy in spaceships in search of a precious substance called Element Alpha. The route their ship follows matches up with real lab samples that might contain cancerous genes. If their ship enters an area filled with complicated hazards, that means they’ve actually located cancer in a sample. The game then informs the researchers of the exact spot where it can be found, saving them tons of time in the process. In a single month, Play to Cure’s “citizen scientists” analyzed the same amount of samples that would have taken a group of experts six months to scan.