ARGOS: VPH Activity Marco Viceconti Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna – Italy Andrew McCulloch University of California S. Diego - USA This project is funded by the European Union

VPH Activity: moderators Marco Viceconti: responsible of the VPH NoE outreach program and coordinator of the VPHOP Integrated project Andrew McCulloch: member of the IUPS Physiome project and of the Multi Scale Modelling consortium of the USA Interagency Modelling and Analysis Group © ARGOS Consortium2

Editorial Team Moderators Editorial Committee NoE Community Everybody (Public Consensus a la STEP) MSM/IMAG Community © ARGOS Consortium3

Activity plan Draft of the position paper on VPH, preparatory of the policy brief Presentation and discussion of the draft with selected experts in USA and Europe Presentation and discussion of the revised draft at key IMAG and VPH NoE meetings Presentation and discussion of the revised draft at the ARGOS meeting in DC Publication and call for comments of the draft policy brief Consolidation and presentation of the policy brief © ARGOS Consortium4

VPH POSITION PAPER FIRST DRAFT Marco Viceconti Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna – Italy Andrew McCulloch University of California S. Diego - USA

Foreword “The vision of integrative biomedical science, shared by a number of distinctly innovative new approaches including systems biology, multiscale modeling, and the physiome, will become practically possible only when an entirely new framework of methods and technologies has been developed for investigating organisms as single systems” © ARGOS Consortium6

7 This Framework of methods and technologies is called the Virtual Physiological Human

VPH Infostructure The infostructure is emerging as the result of many research projects Time horizon for massive take-on of the biomedical research community is VPH infostructure is expected to transform data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom © ARGOS Consortium8

Done it! Now what? Long-term sustainability involves three aspects: Maintenance – transform research prototypes into consolidate resources Service – Services must be operated and curated in ways that ensure their persistence, reliability, security, etc. Outreach – motivated organizations must be established and funded not only to operate these services, but also to promote a serious outreach campaign © ARGOS Consortium9

Recommendations At this stage it is unclear if the policy brief will have to contain only a report on the needs of our community, or also recommendations on the best ways to address such needs © ARGOS Consortium10

Example reccomandation Europe establishes a permanent supranational institute equivalent to NIH NIBIB, tentatively called European Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. US and EU governments appropriate funds for these two institutes to support international VPH research and its infostructure. NIBIB and EIBIB sign a cooperation agreement for the joint development of software and standards for the VPH. The two national grants are used under this cooperation agreement to call for a unique international tender for the development of software tools and standards. © ARGOS Consortium11

Co-development targets Organizational model similar to that used by the NLM for the development of ITK. Possible candidates are: – Common Tool Kit, a core library that should provide the foundation for all biomedical imaging, processing, and modeling FOSS frameworks. Initiative already running spontaneously, driven by NA-MIC, Siemens research, Kitware, B3C, and many others. – Collective development of extensible Information Representation Models such as SMBL or CellML to cover the entire spectrum of data and information types VPH involves. – Standards and toolkits for the brokering, the interconnection, the steering, the orchestration, and the choreography of modeling services into integrative models. © ARGOS Consortium12