The broad goal of this project is to use technology and knowledge developed by the VPR project to realize positive impacts on research and development for therapeutics and patient care for cardiovascular disease. Achieving that broad goal will require successfully translating the knowledge and tool set from VPR basic research to overcome numerous challenges. Among the many challenges that have impeded progress in this area for decades, pharmaceutical companies lack the means to rationally understand, never mind predict, how manipulation of a specific molecular target will impact whole-body function over short (acute) and long (chronic) timescales. They lack the ability to understand and predict why a drug that shows great promise in an animal model of a disease fails to be efficacious in humans. Neither pharmaceutical companies nor clinical practitioners have reliable means of understanding or predicting which subsets of what population will respond most effectively to which therapies. The first aim of this project is to develop Individualized models for clinical diagnostics and systems pharmacology:
Other aims are to use multi-scale models for rational systems-based drug discovery and development, to design optimal therapies, and for rational systems-based translation in drug development.