ICT Healthcare Revolution underway

A collaborative research project, the size of which will challenge the Apollo space Programme has been awarded €1.5m of preliminary funding to revolutionise healthcare around the world. ‘IT Future of Medicine’ (ITFoM) aims to create ‘virtual patients’, which could lead to everyone having their own individually tailored health system, with the potential to save millions of lives and billions of pounds.

With a consortium of over 25 academic institutions and costs expected to reach €1bn, the creation of ‘virtual patients’ could mean that everyone eventually has a computational model of themselves, providing them with tailored healthcare based on their genetic and physiological make-up.

The University of Manchester is playing a big part in this 10 year project, co-creating the computer programmes. Professor Hans Westerhoff, who is leading the Manchester team is confident that the project will be a success; “ITFoM will make general models of human pathways, tissues, diseases and ultimately of the human as a whole. These models will then be used to identify personalised prevention and therapy schedules, and the side effects of drugs.

“The models will be there to help diagnose a particular problem and provide solutions. Obviously this would need to be done in conjunction with a person’s GP depending on the gravity of the situation. Making personalised medicine a reality will thus require fundamental advances in the computational sciences.

“It promises to be unique and ground-breaking because people could access their own health model. It is intended to be a large, straightforward system which can also inform treatment regimes. This is the first time that huge IT systems looking at individual care will be combined with genomics and medical needs” he concluded.

Essentially, the ITFoM system will allow GPs to diagnose correctly and quickly and know which drugs/treatment are the most appropriate through an individual’s genome information.

A vast array of ICT developments must take place in order to make this medicine of the future a reality. This will include new techniques for the rapid acquisition and evaluation of patient data, dynamic storage and processing of real time patient data into relevant mathematical models and the development of new systems that can learn, predict and inform.

Professor Norman Paton, Head of the School of Computer Science, added: "The IT Future of Medicine project provides an exciting opportunity to bring together and build upon advances in medical, biological and computational sciences. The greatest opportunities to improve outcomes in medicine seem likely to come from personalised medicine, the biological sciences are providing the insights required to support informed personalisation, and advanced computational techniques are essential for making sense of the data that informs decision making. This is a fantastic opportunity to bring together advances from these three rapidly developing areas to bring about a paradigm shift in medical practice."

Published: Wednesday, 27th July 2011 by Adelle Kehoe