The Insigneo Institute at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom is developing a virtual human body to be used for testing treatments on patients.
The first phase of the project was introduced Friday, according to The Times of India.
The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) program has received funding from the European Commission (EC).
The institute is working on an in silico, or computer simulated, replica of the human body that can be used for virtual testing of treatments.The testing will be based on the patients' specific needs, possibly predicting future problems they might have, or making invasive procedures unnecessary, The Independent reported.
"Computers are nothing specia l- they know what we know, and sometimes not even that," said Marco Viceconti, scientific director of Insigneo. "But they can stitch things together and they're not scared by sheer size. If we could know in advance which patient would respond to which treatment, we would just quantum leap our efficacy - without inventing anything. The opportunities are enormous."
The VPH will eventually lead to treatment in which the body will be viewed not as a collection of individual organs, but as a single, multi-organ system, The Times of India reported. The program will collect, organize, share, catalogue and combine observations made in laboratories and hospitals.
"What we're working on here will be vital to the future of health care," said Dr. Keith McCormack. "Pressures are mounting on health and treatment resources worldwide. Candidly, without in silico medicine, organizations like the NHS [National Health Service] will be unable to cope with demand. The VPH will act as a software-based laboratory for experimentation and treatment that will save huge amounts of time and money and lead to vastly superior treatment outcomes."
Scientists involved in the program discussed their work and different ways the program could be used to help patients, The Independent reported. These uses varied from creating "virtual arteries" with images from a real heart to creating computer models of lungs to find signs of diseases earlier, as well as using computer simulations to predict issues with women's pelvic floor muscles caused by pregnancy.
