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

The Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), founded by the biopharma company GSK and the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, will provide a new UK hub for research in the rapidly growing field of data-driven mechanistic modelling.

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

The centre 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 advances across multiple disciplines 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 computational 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 Helen Byrne and Professor Philip Maini at the University of Oxford, Professor Steven Niederer at Imperial College London, and Dr Anna Sher at GSK.

Designing effective treatments

The collaboration will harness advanced mathematical modelling to de-risk and accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines and vaccines. By enhancing our understanding of the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of disease, the partnership aims to support the wider adoption of model-informed approaches across the drug development pipeline.

At the University of Oxford, the programme will focus on the development of core mathematical and computational biology models for cartilage and lung diseases. This work will be led by world-class academic experts, and undertaken by a dedicated team of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. Together, they will develop and apply mechanistic models to advance understanding of disease processes and inform the design of more effective treatments.

The research will focus on the construction of mechanistic mathematical models grounded in physics, physiology and pharmacology to elucidate disease mechanisms, and will include multi-scale models, that integrate molecular, cellular and organ-level processes with whole-body physiology.

The Oxford teams will also develop and employ digital twins and virtual patients to simulate treatment responses, optimise dosing strategies, and design in-silico clinical trials. In addition, they will contribute open-source tools, standards for reproducibility, and case studies that showcase the impact of model-informed drug and vaccine development.

Professor Jon Chapman, Head of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, said: 'This exciting new partnership recognises the pioneering role that the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology has played - and continues to play - in applying mathematics to understand diseases and their response to treatment.'

Professor Helen Byrne said: 'We look forward to working with GSK and Imperial to train the next generation of leaders in mechanistic modelling for careers across industry and academia.'

Building digital twins of organs

At Imperial, Professor Niederer and team will build patient-specific models of organs using artificial intelligence and biological datasets, mathematically representing millions of cells in organs such as the lungs, and the mechanistic (or cause-and-effect) relationships they hold to one another, by modelling a proportion of cells found in the real organ.

Using the models, researchers could perform a simple in vitro experiment into the effect of a drug on a single lung cell and then use the model to simulate how this would translate into larger effects such as changes in the behaviour of the airways.

Eventually, the approach could allow clinicians to use digital twins of specific patients to tailor their treatments in real time, an approach that Professor Niederer’s group is already testing with cardiac patients.

Professor Steven Niederer from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London 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.'

Boosting the UK life science industry

MiMeC will focus on embedding a ‘mathematical modelling-first’ mindset towards the development of new therapies.

Dr Anna Sher, MiMeC Co-Director and Quantitative Systems Pharmacology lead in the Respiratory, Immunology and Inflammation Research Unit at GSK, said: 'By cycling between computer modelling, learning from the results, making predictions and then testing them, we can make faster, better decisions in developing new medicines. The tools and models developed through MiMeC strengthen GSK’s ability to generate virtual patients and digital twins to run computer based (in silico) clinical trials, analyse different data types, and test scientific ideas more efficiently.'

Bringing the mechanistic modelling mindset to the forefront of quantitative medicine has the potential to help supercharge the UK life science industry.