Some of the aims of the “physiome project” at the $6 million Auckland Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland are: Carrying out virtual operations to predict results of surgery on children with cerebral palsy. Surgeons would lengthen or shorten muscles on computer models to simulate the child’s gait to test the likely success of surgery. Testing drug toxicity using computers.
Motivating people to reduce obesity by showing simulations of how they’d look given lifestyle choices such as eating fast food. The institute’s director and head of the physiome project Peter Hunter, who is also director of computational physiology at Oxford University, says the long-term aim is to incorporate cells, tissues and organs in computer models to help with medical diagnosis, surgical planning, design of body implants and ultimately drug discovery.
“If you can get this notion of being able to make these models customisable to an individual, and then to have quite a lot of information specifically to that individual, that will make them very important long- term for disease tracking or disease diagnosis.” He says scientists are five to 10 years away from testing drugs on computer models of the heart - which could reduce some of the need for animal and human drugs testing, and cut the cost and time involved in developing drugs.
Getting approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for a new drug now costs about $US1 billion ($1.4b) and can take 12 years. Hunter says this could also prevent disasters such as US company Merck’s discovery in 2004 that people taking its arthritis drug Vioxx had a higher rate of heart attacks and strokes than those on a placebo.