GSK, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford have founded the Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC) to provide a new U.K. hub for research in the emerging modeling-informed medicine field. The Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre will create computer models or “digital twins” of organs and diseases to better understand how diseases of the lungs, liver, and kidneys progress, to discover and develop drugs more quickly, and to target medicines more precisely. The center is backed by £11 million ($14.8 million) funding from GSK and multidisciplinary expertise spanning mathematics, data science, and experimentation from the founding partners. The partners aim to support the life sciences community by bringing together fragmented research in the field and training a new generation of research and development specialists who understand best practice in this emerging area of biomedical research. It will share its models on an open-source basis and build collaborations with further partners. GSK plans to use the research to incorporate models of organs into its drug development pipeline within five years, aided by industrial placements it will provide to researchers from the center. The program is led by Helen Byrne, PhD, and Philip Maini, PhD, at the University of Oxford, Steven Niederer, PhD, at Imperial College London, and Anna Sher PhD, at GSK. “We have seen math used for modeling airplanes, and cars,” said Niederer. “Increasingly, there is a realization that this has benefits in biology, where you can perform virtual experiments in models of humans at great speed and a fraction of the…
