Simulated clinical trials promise healthcare miracles
June 03 2008 / by futuretalk / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Health & Medicine Year: General Rating: 10 Hot
By Dick Pelletier
Movies like The Terminator series and 2001: a Space Odyssey
bring out the little child in us. We love to fantasize about
computers capable of mimicking life. Today, this science fiction is
rapidly becoming real science with computers bringing human cells
to “virtual” life. 
Recognizing the values of this new technology, the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration recently recommended that the industry
expand and accelerate development of simulated clinical trials. For
too long, experts say, the drug industry has relied on human trial
and error; sometimes even intuition, to determine which products
would succeed. Statistics show three of every four drugs entering
clinical trials fail, leaving companies burdened with huge
financial losses and shattering the hopes of patients anxiously
awaiting cures.
From R&D to the pharmacy, each drug development typically takes ten years or more and costs up to $1 billion, which is the prime reason prescription drugs are so astronomically high priced. Researchers struggling to meet time-to-market deadlines, and drug companies anxious to cut costs, are beginning to place their hopes on computer simulations.
Recently, pharmaceutical giant Aventis was racing to develop a competitor to Evista, a hot-selling drug from Eli Lilly. Aventis was already in early human trials, but computer simulations revealed a potential side effect which could lead to cancer. They immediately stopped funding the development and switched to a safer backup drug. Researcher Frank Douglas said the company saved $50 to $100 million and avoided exposing women to a drug that ultimately could have given them cancer. (cont.)
Johnson & Johnson researcher Michael Jackson, admitting that computers cannot simulate the entire human body today, compares progress with computer chess. “There was a time when a grand master would never be beaten by a computer. Then they developed a computer that could instantly analyze 50 moves in advance and computers began to win handily.”
Today, industry vendor Vertex Pharmaceutical offers parallel computing systems with 100 processors that analyze up to 10,000 trial scenarios in an hour and can generate millions of observations, reducing clinical trials by up to three months.
Super-computer maker IBM will soon deliver the world’s most powerful computer to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it will be available to research labs around the world for clinical trial simulations. This amazing machine with its mega teraflops of calculations per second will be powerful enough to analyze the 3D structure of the body’s estimated one million proteins and eventually simulate the entire human body including its millions of genetic variations.
A top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows huge advancements in power with each new generation of machines. Forward-thinkers see a time in the not-to-distant future when our silicon marvels could even become conscious, with superhuman levels of intelligence. These new machines of the future will enable radical breakthroughs in healthcare beyond our wildest dreams.
Most futurists predict that by as early as 2020, we will conquer nearly all human ailments including heart disease, cancer and many age-related diseases. In addition, a few bold visionaries believe that by 2030, technology – aided by nanotech advances – could provide every adult with an ageless, powerful disease-free body. Go “magical future.”
