Philip Maini appointed co-director of new Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre

The Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), founded by biopharma company GSK together with 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 the University of Oxford's Professor Helen Byrne and Professor Philip Maini, Professor Steven Niederer at Imperial College London, and Dr Anna Sher at GSK.

Professor Maini’s Oxford team will focus on the development of core mathematical and computational biology models for cartilage and lung diseases. They will also contribute open-source tools, standards for reproducibility, and case studies that showcase the impact of model-informed drug and vaccine development.

Congratulations to Professor Maini and his fellow directors on their appointment. We look forward to the results of MiMeC’s research.