'Virtual humans' to help cure major diseases

Agreeing on the need to increase crossdisciplicary research, president of the European Federation of Neurological Associations Mary Baker noted that it was important to keep media involved and engage early on a societal debate on the ethical aspects of the current paradigm shift from treatmet to prevention.

"Complexity of living systems can only be decoded by computational modelling and simulation," said Iain Mattaj, director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL/EBI), adding that "we need ICT to analyse, store and distribute the data". This is, he explained, as a human genome encodes some 23,000 proteins and 4,500 RNA coding genes and every cell uses a different subset of them. "Humans are all genetically different and some of the differences will affect their response to drugs," added Mattaj, underlining that drugs should only be given to patients who respond positively to them.

Mattaj said Europe desperately lacks investment in biomedical sciences data resources and infrastructures as there is still not adequate sustainable support to "even core biomolecular data resources" nor useful, generally-accessible clinical data resources. 

In order to foster integration of medicine and ICT, he believes it is necessary to fund multidisciplinary research projects, develop both infrastructure and technology in biology, ICT and their interface as well as shared visions of future health care. It is also necessary to "overcome hurdles to access to medical data," he noted. 

Professor Martin Hofmann-Apitius of the Fraunhofer Institut für Algorithmen und Wissenschaftliches Rechnen said lack of statistically sound data was a challenge for the IT environment on the issue. "Availability of data is driving modelling and simulation at the molecular level," he said, deploring that no public data was available for modelling and simulation at tissue level.