The CompBiomed centre of excellence organised, in collaboration with the VPH Institute, a special session on the The role of exascale computing in computational biomedicine at the VPH2022 conference in Porto (PL) on Friday 9 September 2022.
The session included four speakers from our consortium. Mariano Vasquez (BSC) showed concrete examples of how Alya can be used on supercomputers to simulate on virtual populations the effect of cardiovascular therapies. Marco Viceconti (UNIBO) used the BoneStrength In Silico Trials solution to predict the efficacy of new osteoporosis drug as a guiding example to demonstrate how the simulation of phase III clinical trials does require exascale capabilities. Gabor Zavodsky (UVA) showed how exascale enable simulations of red cells interactions in the blood flow can be used both to solve clinically relevant problems and to falsify causal theories for specific diseases. Last but not least, our coordinator Peter Coveney (UCL) showed how exascale supercomputers enable a new generation of high-torughhput binding affinity simulations that drastically simply drug repurposing, e.g., the use of a grid already on the market to treat a different disease.
The discussion the followed each presentation was a mix of technical questions on the individual models, but also more general questions on the complexity to port digital twin and in silico trials solutions to HPC systems. This confirm the importance of a European centre of excellence on Computational Biomedicine, to support the transition of in silico medicine to become a supercomputing science.
You can read more about VPH2022 here.