United States IMAG makes plans for the future
The Interagency Modeling and Analysis Group (IMAG) is coordination effort between various USA funding agencies interested in the application of multiscale modelling to biomedical research. After a number of years of activities, the group organised a strategic planning meeting entitled “IMAG Futures meeting: The Impact of Modeling on Biomedical Research”. The meeting, which was held on December 15th and 16th, 2009 at the NIH premise in Bethesda, MD, saw the participation of a selected panel of experts, including two representatives of the European VPH Network of Excellence.
IMAG now represents 17 NIH components, four NSF directorates, two Department of Energy (DOE) components, five Department of Defense (DOD) components, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the United States Department of Veterans Administration (USDVA). Over the years IMAG organised various activities, the most important being the Multi-Scale Modeling (MSM) Initiative, and the Predictive Multiscale Models of the Physiome in Health and Disease (MSM Physiome) Initiative. The MSM initiative was started with a solicitation for proposals on 2004 that funded 24 projects, while the MSM Physiome initiative was launched in 2007, as an NIH R01 call still open with deadlines in April and August 2010.
After these two important initiatives IMAG is now planning its future activities. In this context, the Bethesda meeting was an opportunity for IMAG to assess to what extent computational modeling has succeeded or failed to make a difference in the broader research endeavor, and to discuss these issues in the context of current challenges and opportunities for biomedical, biological and behavioral modelling. The event agenda is available.
Two delegates represented the European VPH initiative. Marco Viceconti contributed to the session entitled “Whole-Body scale: behavior and control systems” with a talk on the clinical and research impact of whole body modelling, while Peter Hunter gave a talk entitled: “How Multiscale Modeling can Impact Biomedical and Clinical Research”. In addition Marco Viceconti gave a brief talk entitled “Europe / United States cooperation on biomedical integrative research” where he summarised the various outreach international activities that the VPH community and the European Commission have been conducted in the past years.
A complete webcast of the two days meetings is available from IMAG web site: