The smartphone has already usurped the role of the computer in a number of ways, whether you use it for navigation, to check the weather, or take and share photos of a night out with friends. Now, thanks to a new app developed by Stanford University scientists and Sony, the smartphone is taking over yet another domain to help fight disease.

The team’s new [email protected] mobile app is an extension of the original [email protected] project, which uses idle processing resources from thousands of personal computers to produce a distributed simulation of protein folding, computational drug design and other areas of molecular dynamics with the hope of unlocking secrets of Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease, and a number of different types of cancer.

The mobile app is expected to provide much more than just additional resources, according to Vijay Pande, a professor of chemistry at Stanford, and founder of the [email protected] project. Rather, he says it brings with it the potential to significantly expand the scope of the original program.

“There are a ton of people with really powerful phones, and if we can use them efficiently, it sets the stage for something really great,” said Pande in a Stanford news release.

The primary question that the project seeks to explore is the science of protein folding – the mechanism that turns a string of protein into a seemingly tangled ball. The shape of the folds determines the protein’s function at any given moment, even if the protein has mutated or malfunctioned.

The result is the ability to see into proteins that are linked to specific diseases, such as a kinase protein involved in breast cancer that can influence the effectiveness of certain drugs over others. Other times physicians will cycle through these drugs until they find the best fit for the patient, but in some cases this process takes time that the patient just doesn’t have.

“We’re going to learn a lot about the basic biophysics of kinases and their mutations, but we’re hoping we can help doctors use genomic sequencing of tumors to say which drug should be given first,” Pande said. “We want to help them pick a better Drug-A.”

Although the proteins of interest require only milliseconds to fold, the complexity of the process means that even a supercomputer would need thousands of hours to complete the task. Hoping to bypass this problem, Pande began the [email protected] project in 2007 using a distributed network of idle computers and Playstation 3 GPUs to get the job done.

The result of the original project meant that protein folding simulations could be delivered to researchers in a mere matter of weeks. And now that smartphones pack a comparable processing punch to the PC of yesterday, Pande and his team are eager to tap their potential.

The mobile app works when the phone is completely idle, such as when you’re asleep and the phone is charging. But as soon as you unlock the phone and begin your day, the application will automatically close and the simulation in progress will be passed to another machine.

Once the app’s beta testing is concluded later this year it will be available for all smart phones running Andriod 4.4 and above. The current beta version is available in Google Play, and is compatible with Sony’s Xperia Z series smartphones, as well as the Xperia T3, T2 Aqua, and C3.