CompBioMed has strongly promoted the use of computational methods in medicine and drug development
Over the last decade the CompBioMed Centre of Excellence worked on the Virtual Human, a digital twin of an individual person. However, there are still questions about the usage of personal health data and how patients can store and organise it without risks.
The list of results is long: 310 scientific articles, two books, two films and about a dozen software, tools and databases have been produced by CompBioMed. Funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, 52 universities, companies and research institutes such as the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) have been working on the digital transformation of medicine and the computer-aided development of new drugs for the past ten years. “What I liked about the CompBioMed project was well expressed by one of the evaluators. He said that there's a lot to be gained for a very large number of people and for the future from the software and methods that have been developed,” Peter Coveney says. The Professor of Physical Chemistry and Computer Science is director of the international centre of excellence ComBioMed and teaches at University College London (UCL) and the Universities of Amsterdam and Yale: “It's good that the use of mechanistic modelling and other computational methods, i.e. predictive methods, is starting to gain ground in biology and medicine, because that's how we're going to make more progress in the long term.”
Building high-fidelity human models
At the heart of both CompBioMed projects is the Virtual Human, a digital twin of a human being that will help doctors treat patients and speed up the development of drugs and new treatments. “The human digital twins will be part of a virtual future of medicine. Building accurate, high-fidelity models of people is a huge task, and CompBioMed has contributed to this in a number of ways,” says Coveney. “But we're not talking about a single representation of a whole human being in the near future. It's more about components of the human body that can be accurately simulated on supercomputers.” The simulations calculated on the supercomputers at the LRZ and elsewhere can help train doctors in treatment methods. If they are fed with individual patient data, doctors can use them to test the effect of drugs. After all, simulations are already replacing drug tests on humans: "Medical data needs to be secure enough to help with patient therapies and treatments, but not pose a risk, so data security is one of the biggest challenges for digital health," says Coveney. “On the other hand, it's good to get data – artificial intelligence comes up in all these conversations about the digital twin and medical data. AI needs access to data to run statistical models and methods. But that has led to a lot of ethical and moral questions.” Coveney advocats, patients should be able to securely store and organise their health data in the future like their bank accounts and financial resources, so they could make it available for digital examinations or studies.
Interacting with simulations like a game
Visualisation of simulation data is also an important part of CompBioMed's Virtual Human. For example, the LRZ has visualised the blood flow in the forearm and the brain, and developed workloads and a toolset that can be used to map similar processes in organisms. Visualisation is really important for the work we do,' says Coveney. I'm always pushing for a scenario where you have a reliable simulation that you can interact with in the same way that you interact with video games. This allows clinicians to work with what-if scenarios before performing invasive surgery.
CompBioMed has given a lot of impetus to the digitalisation of medicine and pharmaceutical research, but whether a third phase of the project series CompBioMed will be funded is currently in doubt. "If we get another CompBioMed project, I would include quantum computing," says Coveney. "Bringing quantum devices and supercomputers together is now an essential step because we can only start with this technology in a hybrid setup," Coveney adds. It is also important to speed up supercomputing with the help of GPUs and other technologies, and to complement mathematical simulations with AI methods. (vs)
Facts & Figures CompBioMed
- 18 Core-Partners; 52 associated parners
- 310 sience paper, 2 books, 2 films
- 139 events, 26 workshops,
- Education, trainings, information, software development,, reached round about 190 mio. people
- Funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 675451 (phase 1) and grant agreement No. 823712 (phase 2).
- Project website: https://www.compbiomed.eu/
- Software hub: https://www.compbiomed.eu/compbiomed-software-hub/
- Media: https://www.youtube.com/@computationalbiomedicine2363