Newsletter Issue n. 7 - March 2021

"THE CLOCK IS TICKING"

The message from WHO for World Tuberculosis Day 2021 wants to reach us loud and clear, and with all its urgency: we made a commitment to end TB by 2035 and there is still a long way to go. The outbreak at first, and now the coexistence of SARS-CoV-2, amplifies the difficulties of the fight against TB, from diagnosis to treatment, frustrating the efforts in terms of lowering the annual incidence rate, together with the fatality-case ratio, both identified as targets of the WHO End TB strategy. Now more than before, we can't afford to lose sight of this goal and we must keep raising awareness on the crucial impact in silico technologies can have in the development of better and more effective treatments for tuberculosis.

News from the Project

Partners of the Strituvad consortium invited to InSilc Workshop

Prof Viceconti and Prof Pappalardo talked about In Silico Trials within the STriTuVaD project at the workshop "In Silico Clinical Trials Concepts and Adoption"

Further work on the qualification process

The group from the University of Bologna meets the COMBINE group at the University of Catania to further progress on the qualification of the UISS-TB simulator, discussing the preliminary results from the run of UISS-TB on 100 virtual patients.

MIMESIS taken as an example of university spin-off experience at the Startime event for students

On the occasion of Startime, a three-day full immersion orientation project for students from four Universities of Sicily, Prof Francesco Pappalardo from the University of Catania was invited to present MIMESIS - a startup for the exploitation of Strituvad project results..Keep Reading

STriTuVaD: Improving Tuberculosis vaccine development by combining digital and physical patients

Prof Miguel Juárez from University of Sheffield attended the workshop "How to build your digital human twin?" held at EMPA Akademie in St. Gallen, Switzerland, with a poster presentation on the example of Strituvad in combining digital and physical patients for vaccine development.

Latest Publications

• Generation of digital patients for the simulation of tuberculosis with UISS-TB We propose a sequential approach to sampling from the joint features population distribution in order to create a cohort of virtual patients with some specific characteristics, resembling the recruitment process for the target clinical trial, which then can be used for augmenting the information from the physical the trial to help reduce its size and duration.

• In silico trial to test COVID-19 candidate vaccines: a case study with UISS platform In silico trials are showing to be powerful weapons in predicting immune responses of potential candidate vaccines. Here, UISS has been extended to be used as an in silico trial platform to speed-up and drive the discovery pipeline of vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.

• Moving forward through the in silico modeling of tuberculosis: a further step with UISS-TB In silico trials innovations represent a powerful pipeline for the prediction of the effects of specific therapeutic strategies and related clinical outcomes. Here, we present a further step in UISS framework implementation. Specifically, we found that the simulated mechanism of action of RUTI and INH are in good alignment with the results coming from past clinical phase IIa trials.

• In silico trials: Verification, validation and uncertainty quantification of predictive models used in the regulatory evaluation of biomedical products Regulators now consider also evidences produced in silico. We need accepted methods to evaluate the credibility of models. In this paper we describe the use of the ASME V&V-40 technical standard. We also discuss its application to various types of modelling methods.

View the complete list of publications on our website.

Upcoming Events

7-11 June 2021 5th Barcelona VPH Summer School

It provides junior engineers, early researchers and medical doctors with an integrative view of state-of-the-art research for in silico medicine, following a complete pipeline from basic science and clinical needs, to model application.

15-17 Sept. 2021 COMPBIOMED CONFERENCE 2021: "BUILDING THE VIRTUAL HUMAN"

It will address all aspects of the rapidly burgeoning domain of computational biomedicine, from genome through organ to whole human and population levels, embracing data driven, mechanistic modelling and simulation, machine learning and combinations thereof.

6-9 Sept. 2021 VPH2022 conference "Virtual bodies for treatment development and clinical trials"

It will touch the main topics of machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence; translation from in silico to clinical; computational biology and evolutionary genomics; molecular computation.