IT May Transform World Healthcare

An enormous network of computer programs could revolutionize healthcare around the world, saving myriad lives and billions of dollars.

Working with a number of partners, the academics have been awarded funds from a huge European research program to create “virtual patients”--computational models of individual people--which could lead to everyone having their own individually customized health system based on their genetic and physiologic make-up.

Under the system, physicians would be able to have an instant, in-depth knowledge of an individual patient’s health needs and medical history available readily. This will allow general practitioners (GPs) to diagnose accurately and rapidly illnesses and conditions, saving patients from potentially deadly side effects of incorrectly prescribed medicines and saving huge amounts of money on drugs.

The University of Manchester (UK) researchers are part of a pan-European, 10-year project, called IT Future of Medicine (ITFoM), costing EUR 1 billion. ITFOM has been allocated EUR 1.5 million preliminary funding. A consortium of more than 25 academic institutions and industrial partners with expertise in information and communications technology (ICT), the life sciences, public health, and medicine have come together to begin the process of bringing the project to life.

As it progresses, even more partners will come on board, ultimately making this one of the largest collaborative endeavors since the Apollo space program. A vast range 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. These are needed to provide healthcare professionals and patients with unprecedented insights into matters of health and treatment.

The first goal is to give each GP the power to use a person’s individual genome to inform every stage of disease management--through diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. This will require a transformation in ICT technologies so that relevant computing, storage, networking, and modeling technologies are developed. The IT systems will create mathematical models using vast amounts of data--knowledge to date about how humans work.

ITFoM will also provide scenarios, such as what would happen if a patient takes a specific drug, what would happen if they started running three times a week? Through the gathered genome sequencing and clinical data, the general model will be able to be adapted to suit the particular health demands of any individual, including such issues as allergies, congenital defects, and current treatment. ITFoM was set up as it was believed that, whereas IT and computing played a large role in many commercial scientific areas, its potential power to revolutionize medicine has not yet been realized.

Prof. Hans Westerhoff, who is leading the Manchester part of the project, believes computer models will essentially change the way healthcare is provided. He added, “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 personalized 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 personalized medicine a reality will thus require fundamental advances in the computational sciences. It promises to be unique and groundbreaking 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.”

Prof. 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 personalized medicine, the biological sciences are providing the insights required to support informed personalization, 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.”

ITFoM is one of six pilot projects in the European Future and Emerging Technologies flagship scheme. These projects are vying for EUR 1 billion funding over 10 years to in order to generate a scientific revolution. The finalists are:
1. FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System: ICT can analyze vast amounts of data and complex situations so as to better predict natural disasters, or manage and respond to man-made disasters that cross national borders or continents.
2. Graphene Science and Technology for ICT and Beyond: Graphene is a new substance developed by atomic and molecular scale manipulation that could replace silicon as the wonder material of the 21st century.
3. Guardian Angels for a Smarter Life: tiny devices without batteries that act like autonomous personal assistants, and which can sense, compute, and communicate potentially even while travelling through the bloodstream.
4. The Human Brain Project: understanding the way in which the human brain works can bring the benefits of brain-related or brain-inspired developments to computing architectures, neuroscience and medicine.
5. IT Future of Medicine: digital technology has the power to deliver individualized medicine, based on molecular, physiologic, and anatomic data collected from individual patients and processed on the basis of globally integrated medical knowledge.
6. Robot Companions for Citizens: soft skinned and intelligent robots have highly developed perceptive and emotional skills, and can help people, radically changing the way humans interact with machines.

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