Computer modelling future of medicine

September 4, 2003 | Source: New Zealand Herald

By finding new ways to harness huge amounts of computing power, the costs and time of drug testing can be reduced.

Mapping the human genome has given researchers a massive amount of data which can be used to study reactions to disease and therapeutic interventions at a molecular level.

The DNA of the animals commonly used for testing had also been mapped, meaning it should be possible to simulate tests “in silico.” Information on the way existing drugs worked on individual patients could also be collected and compared against genetic data.

“We believe in 10 years we can eliminate the need for all animal studies, we can eliminate phase one and phase two clinical studies, so computationally we can model a drug or therapeutic agent in the computer against the genomic data,” said Howard Asher, director of global life sciences for Sun Microsystems.