Hitachi, Elan and TCD have joined forces in an EU-funded project that will see computers used as virtual patients to study new ways to administer drugs.
The 15-month project, announced late last week, has attracted EU Esprit support worth more than £190,000. But additional investment by the two companies will bring the project budget to almost £315,000, according to Ms Audrey Crosbie, project manager of ICeTACT, the Irish Centre for Transfer of Advanced Computing Technology. ICeTACT, based on the Trinity campus, is one of 20 European centres which direct EU funding towards the commercialisation of community research.
The aim of the project, she said, was to create a "virtual laboratory" on a powerful high-performance parallel computer based in the Hitachi Dublin Laboratory. The 16-node Hitachi SR2201 machine can perform 4.8 billion computations per second.
"The idea is to try to simulate drug-delivery systems such as tablets, capsules and implants. We are trying to simulate how these dissolve when in use," Ms Crosbie explained.
There are significant "time and cost" savings involved if these systems can be simulated on a computer before they reach in-vitro testing, which is both time-consuming and expensive. The computer can be used as a test bed to assess which delivery systems work. Only those which hold promise would go forward for invitro testing, eliminating the less interesting systems.
"The in-vitro tests can take up to six months in the laboratory," Ms Crosbie said. "There have been mathematical models around for 40 or 50 years for these processes. However, high-performance computing has never been used in this way."
The project, known as PSUDO (Parallel SimUlation of Drug release cOde) is a complex collaboration involving the companies but also a number of Trinity departments.
The computer is in the Hitachi Dublin Lab. The Department of Mathematics will work with the lab on the computer modelling and software. The college's School of Pharmaceutics will develop pharmacological and biological data for delivery systems which the models can assess. The campus-based Elan Pharmaceutical Technologies labs will validate the models by in-vitro testing afterwards.
The virtual lab's promoters believe that modelling drug-delivery systems in this way could reduce the volume of testing in human and animal trials. They also believe it could shorten the transition from the discovery and development of a drug to its ultimate use in human or animal treatment. This could in turn reduce drug costs but will also help in the development of novel drug-delivery systems.