Synergy will develop a simulation environment and a decision-support system aiming at enabling deployment of systems medicine. The three core elements are a knowledge base (KB), an inference engine (IE), and a graphical visualisation environment (GVE). The project focuses on patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The KB will include five well established physiological models addressing: 1) Central and peripheral O2 transport and utilization, 2) Pulmonary gas exchange, 3) Regional-lung heterogeneities in ventilation and perfusion, 4) Skeletal muscle bioenergetics, and 5) Mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. These models will be written in systems biology mark-up language (SBML) and vertically integrated. Ontologies will be used as the default knowledge-representation system. The KB will include multi-level data from experimental studies (BioBridge), data from a multicentre longitudinal study on COPD phenotyping (PAC-COPD) and public datasets.

The IE will enable to explore associations over the KB, perform transversal multi-scale model integration and related simulations including interactions among O2-availability/O2-utilization, ROS generation, systemic inflammation and abnormal tissue re-modelling.

The Web-based GVE will facilitate relevant simulations in a more intuitive way with respect to the state of the art, addressing two main user profiles: bio-researchers and clinicians.
The focus will be on underlying mechanisms of COPD phenotypes associated with poor prognosis. Disease model validation and refinement will be done using a well-established, large dataset (ECLIPSE) together with experimental studies designed to test 'in silico' generated hypotheses. Besides the use of the simulation environment by bio-researchers for optimal experimental design, the Synergy platform will be a relevant decision-support tool for integrated healthcare strategies aiming at modulating the evolution of COPDs.

Contact Information
SANCHEZ MORENO Maria
FUNDACIO PRIVADA BARCELONA DIGITAL CENTRE TECNOLOGIC
C/ Roc Boronat 117
08018
SPAIN
Tel: +34-935534540
Fax: +34-935534540
Email: Contact