This talk will cover the background to the creation of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute (VPHi), what its vision and objectives are, and how it has been influential in driving forward the modelling and simulation agenda in Europe. I will also outline its key role in a significant European Commission funded project that led to the establishment of the Avicenna Alliance, an industry focused alliance with academia that is focusing on influencing policy development supporting the use of in silico approaches in healthcare. Although it is EU based, the Avcienna Alliance's focus goes beyond those borders to consider collaborations with the US and the Asia-Pacific regions to work towards harmonisation of policy in the fast-emerging area of technology.. The talk will not be technical, but rather will focus on raising awareness of the VPHi and the Alliance, what is being done in Europe, who we are talking to and what we would like to achieve as a community to ensure that modelling and simulation becomes routinely established in 21st Century medical practice in its broadest sense.
Dr Henney has a PhD in Medicine and many years’ academic research experience, studying cardiovascular disease at the pathological, cellular, molecular and genetic level in laboratories in London, Cambridge and Oxford. He then moved into industry, spending 13 years with AstraZeneca. Ultimately leading global programmes exploring strategic improvements aimed at reducing drug failure in development, he created and headed a new department that focused on pathway mapping and modelling, which evolved to establish the practice of Systems Biology, supporting projects in discovery and development. Dr Henney has extensive experience in directing and managing large, complex teams across disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries, latterly in the area of Systems Biology and Systems Medicine. His experience in this area led to an invitation to direct the major €50M German national flagship programme, The Virtual Liver Network. At the time, the largest Systems Biology programme in Europe it involved management of over 200 contributing scientists from a range of disciplines, including clinicians, and 69 Principle Investigators in 36 independent institutions, including industry, distributed over the whole of Germany, working on 44 projects. Operating as a distributed team, rather than a consortium, the leaders successfully implemented a range of modelling approaches focused on liver function and dysfunction that reached from the lab bench into clinical studies on volunteers and patients.Following the end of the VLN Programme, Dr Henney was elected to be part-time Executive Director of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute, a not-for-profit organisation promotingthe use of computational modelling and simulation to interpret quantitative biological information and understand the dynamics of biological and physiological function. As part ofthat role, he is engaged in establishing a new partnership with industry, The Avicenna Alliance for Predictive Medicine, which focuses on developing a policy framework supporting the use of in silico technologies in medicine.
This webinar is sponsored by IMAG
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