Tim Radford
Japanese and Irish researchers have begun to build a virtual guinea pig – a computer code version of a human who would be used to test the effects of powerful new drugs.
The project is called Psudo, which stands for parallel simulation of drug release code. But it is likely to be dubbed Project Frankenstein because, like Mary Shelley’s baron, the scientists plan to assemble their parallel monster a bit at a time.
The first part of the project, which has money from Brussels and the backing of Hitachi, is about to begin at Trinity College, Dublin, not with a grisly body part but with the equivalent of the bolt through the neck – a non-human aspect. In the next 15 months, 15 scientists will start modelling new and more effective ways of releasing drugs into the stomach and the bloodstream. This could make for fewer doses with fewer side effects. It could also cut development costs: it can take 10 years and cost 100-million to take a drug from laboratory to market.
Yutaka Kuwahara, chief of Hitachi research in Europe, knows how complex the project could be. He says he is aiming at feasible targets: “Once we succeed, then we can experiment.”
The research is not likely to lead to an end to animal testing or human trials. But researchers would ideally save time by eliminating some dangerous formulations of drugs before they might be tested on animals. Pills are complicated things: like cruise missiles, there is a lot more to the design than an explosive warhead.
Dr Anne-Marie Healy, Trinity College, wants to turn the process by which a tablet dissolves, and releases both the excipient and the drug into the world around it, into a computer model.
“We could go to the computer and change the dimensions of the tablet, to see what effect taking out one excipient or adding another will have on the release profile. It’s easier to do that than to go into the lab every time you want to try out a new idea.”
Computer simulation is not new: there is already a “virtual human” in thin, three- dimensional slices for anatomists to study on the Internet, and laboratory mice researchers have their own virtual mouse. But although geneticists could soon complete the entire DNA “recipe” for the 100 000 or so genes that add up to a working human, it will be a long time before anyone understands all the details even of the simplest human physiological processes.