Posted: 2nd October 2017

Elisa Passini received the Technological Innovation Award at the Safety Pharmacology Society Meeting 2017 for “Virtual Assay: a User-Friendly Framework for In Silico Drug Trials in Populations of Human Cardiomyocyte Models” (Elisa Passini, Oliver Britton, Alfonso Bueno-Orovio, Blanca Rodriguez.) 

Computational Cardiovascular Science  team at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, in collaboration with Oxford Computer Consultants and supported by a EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award. It’s a user-friendly software for In Silico drug trials, using populations of human cardiac cellular models based on well-understood human cardiac physiology. The human cell populations are calibrated against experimental data and used to predict the effects of different pharmaceutical agents on human cellular response at the population level. Several major companies in the pharmaceutical industry are already using the software with promising results.

Previously, research underpinning Virtual Assay received important awards including Oliver Britton being one of the four finalist at the 2014 UK ICT Pioneers awards and the winner of the 2014 international 3Rs prize by the National Centre for the Replacement Refinement & Reduction of Animals in Research.