ExaScience Life Pharma - ExaScience Life Pharma
From 01-07-2013 to 31-12-2015
Description
The overarching goal of the ExaScience Life Lab, and this project in particular, is to understand the current and future HPC needs of the pharmaceutical industry and to help the HPC industry prepare to fulfill those needs. For this reason, this combined project (of two linked proposals) involves industrial partners from both the pharmaceutical (Janssen Pharmaceutica) and HPC (Intel) industries, to provide both sets of boundary conditions: the requirements of the applications, and the available computer technologies to improve performance. However, bridging the gap between the two different industries remains a significant challenge, and for this reason the project also includes academic experts across the whole stack from the pharmaceutical applications programs, down through the design of algorithms and software, to the exploration of possible computer designs. Particular problems include how to manage the massive levels of parallelism that will be required to reach the computer performance targets, how to simulate different computer designs to be able to explore the space of computer designs, what sort of programming model is acceptable to the users, and what the best algorithms are to achievehave efficient and usable solutions to simulation and data processing. To address these challenges, we have selected world-class experts from Imec and the five Flemish universities. By providing solutions to these problems, this project will show how to solve the computational problems of the pharmaceutical industry using expected improvements in hardware technology. This project will serve as the foundation to build a long term research lab for this topic, to serve the important and growing biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors in Flanders and Europe. As HPC is a strategic interest rather than a core competence of the life sciences companies, such a 3rd party lab is this best way to provide them with the information and services needed that they need to make the step to genuinely benefiting from HPC as a technology. Similarly, such a lab is ideally placed to feed information back to technology companies about the relevant characteristics of driver applications and how technology solutions can be tuned to them.
Team
- Jan Fostier, Co-promoter (External)
- Piet Demeester, Co-promoter (External)
- Tim VandenBulcke, Co-promoter (External)
- Geert Molenberghs, Co-promoter (External)
- Yves Moreau, Co-promoter
- Karl Meerbergen, Co-promoter (External)
- Jan Aerts, Co-promoter
- Wilfried Verachtert, Promoter (External)
- Inge Thijs, Team member
Financing
Funding: IWT - Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie
Program/Grant Type: IWT O&O - IWT Industrial R&D projects
Events
2/09/2024:
PhD defense - Martijn Oldenhof
Machine Learning for Advanced Chemical Analysis and Structure Recognition in Drug Discovery
3/09/2024:
Meet the Jury Igor Tetko on Advanced Machine Learning in Drug Discovery
12/09/2024:
Multimodal analysis of cell-free DNA for sensitive cancer detection in low-coverage and low-sample settings
Seminar by Antoine Passemiers
News
STADIUS Alumni Herman Verrelst – new CEO of Biocartis
08 June 2017
Herman Verrelst, the founder of KU Leuven spin-off Cartagenia, who has been working in Silicon Valley, US for the last few years will be returning to Belgium to follow the steps of Rudi Pauwels as CEO of the Belgian diagnostic company, Biocartis.
Supporting healthcare policymaking via machine learning – batteries included!
29 May 2017
STADIUS takes the lead in the data analytics efforts in an ambitious European Project MIDAS.
Marc Claesen gives an interview about his PhD for the magazine of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences "Geniaal"
10 February 2017
Did you know that in Belgium approximately one third of type 2 diabetes patients are unaware of their condition?
Joos Vandewalle is nieuwe voorzitter KVAB
09 October 2016
Op 5 oktober 2016 heeft de Algemene Vergadering van de Academie KVAB Joos Vandewalle verkozen tot voorzitter van de KVAB.