27 February 2008
Virtual human(s)
An entire ‘virtual human’ within the next 30 years: fantasy or reality?
Computer technologies seem to be burgeoning on an almost daily basis, and with this come ever-increasing opportunities for replacing animal experiments. The newest idea, outlined in Nature this month, is to create a computational model of a human that could simulate tens of thousands of cellular interactions and could be used to make predictions for drug development.
The idea was hatched by Japanese and UK-based researchers at a three-day workshop in Japan this month, but it seems the scientists involved aren’t the first to conceive this ambitious goal. The ‘Virtual Physiological Human’ (VPH) is well underway, led by Professor Peter Coveney at University College London and has already been used to simulate the effects of an HIV drug on the human body.
The VPH project, funded by the EU’s 7th Framework programme, harnesses power from both the UK and US national grids to feed supercomputers that simulate organ, tissue, cell and molecular level interactions with a drug.
The massive projects both require interdisciplinary collaborations between international researchers and could signal the start of a boost in funding for the field of systems biology. We think it’s time the two teams got talking!
Sources: Nature (2008) 451:879; http://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/VPH/VPHnews/vphhiv