AN UDDINGSTON man with an incurable brain tumour has urged Scots to join in the fight against cancer – while they’re asleep.

Alex Bourne has been battling the disease since a freak seizure first revealed the tumour in 2009.

He was told he likely had a brain tumour but it doctors were unable to operate due to the potential complications which meant he was given anti-seizure medication and sent home.

He told the Evening Times: “I had no family history of epilepsy or anything like that so it was a shock.

“I went home and forgot about it, really until it happened again years later.”

Six years later, another seizure saw the 32-year-old admitted for an operation and it was confirmed he had a grade three brain tumour, known as oligo dendro glioma.

Despite the surgery removing 40 per cent of the tumour, as well as rounds of both chemotherapy and radiotherapy doctors are unable to treat it any further, meaning the Vodafone worker will have to be scanned regularly to monitor its growth.

Thankfully, it hasn’t increased yet but he’s knows, one day, it will.

Alex said: “I’ve been stable for a while so it has been reduced to a scan every six months but the doctors have told me, at some point, I will go in and it’ll be a different conversation.

“There’s no way to quantify when that will be. It could be five, 10, 15, even 20 years we just don’t know, so we take every day as it comes.

“It’s difficult but I look at it like ‘I’ve got a diagnosis, what do we do about it?’ There’s no point falling apart, it won’t make any difference.”

He added: “The most difficult part is watching the people are you. Cancer gets into every aspect of your life and that’s the real challenge.”

It wasn’t until the true extent of his condition was realised, prompting his decision to back a new app designed to help scientists discover a cure.

Now he hopes apps like DreamLab, which has been created by the Vodafone Foundation, will ensure others who develop the disease in the future will have better treatment options than he has.

He told the Evening Times: “After everything I’ve been through, why not?

“As weird as it sounds, I consider myself quite fortunate. There are people out there who have real problems but I’m able to function day to day, fairly normally. I can still help out.

“So, I thought ‘what can I do?’ Because I want to make sure I give something back and it’s so easy.

“It’s just an app that goes on your phone, you don’t have to climb Ben Nevis or raise a lot of money and you’re helping fight cancer.”

The app, which has been launched by Star Wars star John Boyega, can be downloaded free on ios or Andriod.

Users “sleep like a hero” by leaving their phone to charge while connected to WIFI overnight, which allows the app to use the collective processing power of smart phones to analyse small chunks of datasets in a bid to fast track cancer research.

A new device can run up to 60 calculations, solving up to 24,000 problems in six hours if fully charged and plugged in.

Dr Kirill Veselkov, from Imperial College London’s department of surgery and cancer, said: “We are currently generating huge volumes of health data around the world every day, but just a fraction of this is being put to use.

“By harnessing the processing power of thousands of smartphones, we can tap into this invaluable resource and look for clues in the datasets.

“Ultimately, this could help us to make better use of existing drugs and find more effective combinations of drugs tailored to patients, thereby improving treatments.”