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UCL in the News: Building HIV resistance using grid computing

4 April 2008

John-Paul Kamath, 'Computer Weekly' The processing power of grid computing will be used by UCL this year to develop treatments that could be more effective in the treatment of people with HIV.

Doctors currently work by prescribing a course of drugs and then test whether these are working. One of the goals of the project is for such 'trial and error' methods to eventually be replaced by patient-specific treatments tailored to a person's unique genotype.

"To be able to tailor medical treatment to a person and their ailments, instead of giving them some average course of treatment - we're only going to get to that level of patient specificity if we use computational science and high performance computing, of that there can be no doubt," said Professor Peter Coveney (UCL Chemistry). …

"The method is an early example of what is called the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH). The idea behind the VPH is to link networks of computers across the world to simulate the internal workings of the human body," he said. …

"This study represents a first step towards the ultimate goal of 'on-demand' medical computing, where doctors could one day 'borrow' supercomputing time from the national grid to make critical decisions on life-saving treatments," said Professor Coveney. …

"We have some difficult questions ahead of us, such as how much of our computing resources could be devoted to helping patients and at what price. At present, such simulations - requiring a substantial amount of computing power - might prove costly for the National Health Service, but technological advances and those in the economics of computing would bring costs down." …