Stakeholders and beneficiaries
The major stakeholders in the Integrative Biology project are the participants and their host organisations, EPSRC and the UK e-Science Programme, the UK biomedical community and those who will benefit from the advances which the project will make in our understanding of heart disease and cancer.
Several sectors of the community are likely to benefit from the project:
- In both cancer and heart disease, Integrative Biology will improve the design and understanding of new drugs as well as enabling optimisation of novel treatments such as gene therapy or cancer vaccines which might complement conventional cytotoxic drugs. The tools developed by the project will improve the productivity of clinical and physiological researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.
- The UK e-Science community will benefit from access to new tools developed by the project and from the example of an integrated computational framework that the project will develop. This will be useful in other areas requiring a total system approach such as understanding environmental change processes.
- Current and future users of national Grid services will benefit through the improved accessibility and usability which the project is helping to establish.
- The project is also making a substantial contribution to training the next generation of computational biologists, an area expected to see rapid growth in the near future and one of great strategic importance to the UK.
- But most importantly, the ultimate beneficiaries will be patients with heart disease, cancer and, in the longer term, other potentially fatal diseases.