By Amy X. Wang for Quartz

Curing cancer isn’t exactly something the average citizen can do. It takes years of training to break into the highly specialized field of cancer research, and that’s only after mastering complex scientific principles and completing an exhaustive medical education.

There is so much that these experts have to be able to deal with. The most important thing is that they have a solid knowledge about what it is that they are actually doing and, were they to have to consider viewing freeze dryers and lyophilizers, or other equipment, that they would know exactly what to do with it. If they can’t master the complex scientific principles that they learn during their medical education, then they will not be able to help find a cure for cancer.

They also need to be able to do simple things, like being able to pick your pipette tip when it comes to sorting out any samples that they are working with. If they can’t look after their research properly then a cure for cancer won’t happen. There is so much more than they need to be able to do though, hence why an average citizen probably wouldn’t be able to help – or so you would have thought.

In actual fact, non-experts can still actively help the cause. It may even be as easy as owning a smartphone. Of course, some may be concerned about the risks pertaining to application security (check phone security statistics). However, research apps might have the software to limit personal information leaks and may not have to be a cause for concern.

In conjunction with Australia’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, the telecommunications company Vodafone Australia has developed a mobile app that harnesses the immense processing power of a smartphone for cancer research. Users who download the app can simply plug in their phones and go to sleep; overnight, the phones will receive genetic sequencing tasks from the Garvan Institute, crunch data to complete the tasks, and then send the completed information back to the institute for research use.