An ambitious plan to create a "virtual human" in a computer has passed its first test, heralding a day when drug trials will rely more on silicon chips than animals.
The combined supercomputing power of Britain and America has enabled scientists to simulate an Aids infection in the virtual being, so they could see how effective an Aids drug really is in blocking a key protein used by the lethal virus to multiply.
A computer simulation of blood flow in a virtual human brain
To the relief of the researchers behind the effort that will cost an estimated £350 million, the study provides encouraging evidence that the first £65 million stage of the Virtual Physiological Human project behaves like the real thing, suggesting that this approach could one day be used to tailor personal drug treatments, for example for HIV patients who are developing resistance to their drugs.
The study ran a large number of simulations to predict how strongly the drug saquinavir would interact with strains of Aids virus that had become resistant because they made slightly different versions of an enzyme called HIV-1 protease, a protein produced by the virus to propagate itself.
The predictions matched reality, boosting confidence that a computer animated being could become a valuable new tool for medicine.
The study, by Prof Peter Coveney, Dr Ileana Stoica and Kashif Sadiq of University College London involved a sequence of simulation steps performed across half a dozen supercomputers wired up on a grid in the UK and also the US TeraGrid, which took two weeks and used computational power roughly equivalent to that needed to perform a long-range weather forecast.
There is already a model of the heart that beats and reacts to drugs in a realistic way, thanks in part to pioneering work in Oxford University by Prof Denis Noble, with Prof Peter Hunter in New Zealand.
The next step is to simulate the whole human body by harnessing supercomputers of the sort more usually used to forecast the weather and model nuclear explosions across the world.
The dream is that one day, thanks to this effort, a computer model will be able to bleed like we do and see the same cascade of clotting factors go into action.
Immune cells will stream to the virtual wound, and biochemical stress reactions will send chemical shockwaves rippling through the body.
The visible human can be treated, dissected and explored in unprecedented detail, so one can see blood vessels dilate, the blood flow faster and witness the flapping of a faulty heart valve.
One can even see blood changing colour when passing through the lungs, or chart what happens when abnormal tangles of blood vessels form in the brain that can cause seizures, paralysis and bleeds.
Supercomputer 'virtual human' to help fight disease
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
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