GSK, Imperial College London and University of Oxford launch centre to create computer models of lungs, liver and kidneys

The Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), founded by the biopharma company GSK and world-leading universities Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, will provide a new UK hub for research in the emerging modelling-informed medicine field.

The centre will create computer models or ‘digital twins’ of organs and diseases to better understand how diseases of the lungs, liver and kidneys progress, to discover and develop drugs more quickly, and to target medicines more precisely.

It is backed by £11 million funding from GSK and multidisciplinary expertise spanning mathematics, data science, and experimentation from the founding partners.

The partners aim to support the life sciences community by bringing together fragmented research in the field and training a new generation of research and development specialists who understand best practice in this emerging area of biomedical research. It will share its models on an open-source basis and build collaborations with further partners.

GSK plans to use the research to incorporate models of organs into its drug development pipeline within five years, aided by industrial placements it will provide to researchers from the centre.

The programme is led by Professor Steven Niederer at Imperial, Professors Helen Byrne and Philip Maini at the University of Oxford, and Dr Anna Sher at GSK.

Professor Steven Niederer, from Imperial's National Heart and Lung Institute, said:

We have seen maths used for modelling aeroplanes and cars – and increasingly there is a realisation that this has benefits in biology, where you can perform virtual experiments in models of humans at great speed and a fraction of the usual cost.