What do you expect to achieve in this project?
CompBioMed is working to improve computational-based techniques for the investigation and explanation of problems relating to human health. Targeting research scientists from physical, computer and biomedical sciences, software and infrastructure developers and clinicians from industry, academia and medicine, we will engage all levels in the use and uptake of our innovative models and simulations. We invest in community building to spread knowledge, tools and the best practice to students, researchers and decision-makers across the domain. Supercomputers have the potential to enhance industries in the healthcare sector, underpinning a range of emerging sectors, such as those concerned with e-health and personalised medicine.
How will European citizens benefit from this project, both from the technology developments it accomplishes as well as the scientific breakthroughs it may achieve?
The promise of computational biomedicine is to improve the speed, cost, quality and variety of clinical decision-making by harnessing supercomputers. In the future, this will mean fundamentally better, cheaper and personalised medical care for society. We are making our research applications accessible to both clinicians and the general public, developing them for commercial viability. With this in mind, we are also educating medical students in the use and potential of supercomputers in a clinical setting. In the interim period, it is possible that our simulations could provide an insight into current diseases and treatments, which could directly improve healthcare.
Is EU funding important for the European research? How has it contributed to your projects/careers/success
CompBioMed is a consortium of 15 Core Partners, all of whom are direct beneficiaries of the EU funding which enables time and money to spend on their research. We also have almost 40 Associate Partners, mostly from Europe, who collaborate closely with a variety of these partners. Without the help of a wide net of collaborators, we cannot achieve our ambitious aims. In the two years that our project has been running, we have published nearly 50 publications, and have enabled the initiation of two small companies.
What are you going to exhibit at ICT2018? What should visitors expect to see/experience upon visiting your booth?
During the exhibition we will show our film, ‘Virtual Humans’ available with subtitles to enable people to watch no matter how loud the event may be.
We will also use the opportunity to showcase some of our applications in a running of our key webinars, which include demos of the following applications:
- Introduction to cloud computing for the VPH (with examples from OpenBF library from University of Sheffield)
- High-Performance Computing (HPC) simulations of cardiac electrophysiology using patient specific models (with examples from CHASTE and Alya software)
- High Throughput Molecular Dynamics for Drug Discovery (with examples of protein-ligand binding computations)
Other links:
CompBioMed in ICT 2018 exhibition catalogue