The maat Vision

The Physiome, Systems Biology, the Virtual Physiological Human, Personal Health Systems, Biomedical Informatics, Life Science e-Infrastructures, Systems Pharmacology. All of these domains share one common issue: the need for integration. To implement biomedical research outputs into clinical practice and healthcare industries we need to integrate data, information, knowledge and wisdom. We need to integrate data of the same patient stored in different hospitals in different member states or in clinical research databases; we need to integrate the information related to various parts and processes of the human body into a systemic understanding of pathophysiology; we need to integrate the knowledge digitally captured into metadata, ontologies and models in order to respond to the combinatorial explosion of cognitive complexity that integrative research is producing; and we need to integrate the wisdom produced in the research laboratories and in clinical practice, which will be formalized in guidelines, standards and protocols and used to promote translation of basic science and integrative models into healthcare benefits.

This is a huge challenge that, if met, will have a tremendous impact on the life of our citizens, and on the European and international economy. The vision of a “digital me” that contains all my healthcare information, safely managed for access by the various biomedical professionals with my approval, communicated with all my wearable and implanted technology to constantly monitor my health status and informing me, my family and friends, or my healthcare providers of alarming events, supporting the collaboration of various specialists around my complex systemic diseases, and used with all my data to predict the future development of my health in order to facilitate disease prevention and a fully self-aware lifestyle, is a powerful vision. But the challenges are huge.

maat leads some of the most prominent e-Health initiatives on the international level in paediatrics, cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease and lung disease, among others, working alongside some of the major Research centers, Hospitals and Health Professionals in the development of HealthGrid Platforms and propose a new Global Infrastructure, the Super Peta-scale data Infrastructure for Distributed e-Health and biomedical Research services (SPIDeR).

SPIDeR, maat’s eHealth Platform, is addressing this challenge by promoting and facilitating the use of computational models, software tools and web services.

maat´s goal is to achieve a more efficient and effective 21st century healthcare system and to create new economic opportunities for European healthcare industries. In common with other areas of application of modern scientific methods, medical practice will benefit from technologies in which digital data enables predictable outcomes through quantitative models that integrate physical processes across spatial scales down to the molecular level. We need to promote personalized, predictive, integrative and evidence-based approaches to medicine.

Health Delivery Services (HDS) will use every time more computational tools to link individual patient data with virtual population databases via the knowledge of biological processes encoded in mathematical models. The biomedical community also now has the opportunity, thanks to the adoption of new model and data standards and a common set of reference ontologies, to assemble the molecular pieces from 50 years of reductionist science in order to understand genotype-phenotype relationships by linking databases of genetic and proteomic data to anatomy and function at the cell, tissue and organ levels. Biophysically based computational modeling of the human body, applied to human physiology and the diagnosis and treatment of disease, will revolutionize 21st century bio-sciences and medicine.