Vodafone Australia launched an intriguing new app called DreamLab, allowing Android users to help advance cancer research by lending their smartphone's power.

Cancer is a ruthless, merciless disease that continues to have alarming death rates worldwide, with various forms affecting all segments of the population. Despite advances in research, more work is still necessary and various initiatives aim to find more answers and potential cures.

The DreamLab app is designed to use a smartphone's computing power to help cancer research when the smartphone owner is not actually using the handset. More specifically, the app will pull the processing power of each smartphone with DreamLab installed to create some kind of network supercomputer.

"Help solve cancer while you sleep," reads the tagline of the DreamLab app.

"Researchers are hindered by limited access to supercomputers," explains Vodafone Australia. "So that's where you and the DreamLab app come in. It's a free to purchase app* that uses the processing power of your idle phone to solve a piece of the cancer research puzzle."

According to the company, just 1,000 people installing the app would speed up cancer research and help solve cancer riddles as much as 30 times faster.

The app was developed in collaboration with Sydney-based Garvan Institute of Medical Research, aiming to help research for breast, prostate, ovarian and pancreatic cancer.

DreamLab also allows users to choose the type of cancer for which they want to support research with their idle phones. At the same time, users can also choose how much data they want to allocate each month toward this endeavor (250 MB, 500 MB or 1 GB), and it runs on both Wi-Fi and mobile networks. Vodafone Australia won't even charge its customers for data transmitted through the app. It's also worth pointing out that DreamLab will run only when the phone is idle and fully charged.

While mobile data used for DreamLab research is free for customers on Vodafone Australia, however, contributing over Wi-Fi may incur charges based on the user's Wi-Fi plan. Roaming will also involve international rates, and "other functions in the app might use a very small amount of data which you will be charged for," adds Vodafone.

The app is now available for download on Google Play. Check out the video below to get a better idea of this effort.