Integrative Biology project demonstrates early results
Integrative Biology is demonstrating some of its early results at the EPSRC e-Science Programme Meeting at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh on 21/22 April 2005.
These demonstrations illustrate the growing collaborative links between some of the world's leading heart modelling research groups and the Integrative Biology project. Integrative Biology is building a computing, data management and visualisation infrastructure which will give biomedical researchers access to large scale parallel computational and data resources available on the UK e-Science Grid, and eventually on Grids worldwide. This will enable them to build higher resolution models and to simulate cost-effectively for the first time complex cardiac behaviour such as arrhythmia and fibrillation. The long term vision of the project is the development of effective treatment regimes for, and eventually reduction in occurrence of, these conditions.
The demonstrations are being given by computational biologists from three groups: a collaboration between Tulane University in New Orleans and Oxford University; a team from the University of Graz in Austria; and a group at Sheffield University in the UK. Their research projects are summarised on a poster which also shows other biomedical research groups who are or will be collaborating with the Integrative Biology team over the coming year. Additional posters illustrate how Integrative Biology is helping to improve facilities for cancer tumour and cardiac tissue modellers. These collaborative activities will both stimulate current research into heart and cancer tumour modelling and help to drive development of the Integrative Biology infrastructure.
Other posters at the meeting explain the architecture of the Integrative Biology infrastructure, and provide more detail on the visualisation , data management and computational steering aspects of this infrastructure.