09 - "Enabling Precision #Medicine through the Digital Twin and In Silico Trial"
Topic: Enabling Precision Medicine through the Digital Twin and In Silico Trial
Panelist: Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She leads the Computational Cardiovascular Science team, with a key focus on its members' career development, and a large network of collaborators in industry, hospitals, academia and with regulatory bodies. Her research is on human in silico trials to investigate the response of human diseased hearts to therapies, through computational modelling and simulation augmenting experimental and clinical methods. She is also Head of the Computational Biology and Health Informatics Theme in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford, and holds leadership and advisory positions in several national and international organisations. Blanca has been awarded generous funding by research councils, charities, industry and the European Commission.
Abstract: Precision Medicine aims at providing the most accurate diagnosis and best treatments for each patient. Whereas this has primarily been genomic-centred so far, there is now a wide recognition of the need to consider a wide spectrum of lifestyle, environment, and biology conditions. Characterising such diversity of factors requires large quantity and quality of patients’ datasets, and at the same time, innovative approaches for their analysis, drawing on the increasing power of computers and algorithms. New concepts are being proposed, such as the Digital Twin and In Silico Drug Trials. In this presentation, I will address this framework for cardiology and pharmacology, highlighting how combined computational approaches including modelling and simulation, and machine learning can boost the capacity for diagnosis and prognosis, as well as future treatments.
