IT Future of Medicine (ITFoM) at the FET Flagship Midterm Conference in Warsaw, Poland
ITFoM aims to create a computer model, a “virtual patient”, by developing general models of human pathways, tissues, and ultimately of the whole human. Medicine based on molecular, physiological, anatomical and environmental data from individual patients will enable physicians to identify personalised prevention schedules, therapies and potential effects on individual patients. The potential benefits are enormous in terms of reduction of healthcare costs as well as for each individual patient: identification of efficient drug combinations on an individual basis; substantial advances in disease prevention and treatment; better data access and use for health professionals, healthcare systems, and researchers.
Such data-rich medicine poses unprecedented challenges for ICT - in terms of hardware, storage and communication - and requires fundamental advances in the computational sciences. Thus academic groups from a range of research backgrounds joined forces with their industry-based colleagues in making ITFoM a reality. As a result, ITFoM brings together 51 partners and associated members from the whole of Europe and beyond, including world leading academic institutes and multinational companies such as Siemens, Illumina, IBM, Intel, XEROX, Oracle, Roche, Life Technologies and Agilent.
Additional information about ITFoM is available at http://www.ITFoM.eu(opens in new window)