Speaker:

Professor Blanca Rodriguez

Professor Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Head of the Computational Biology and Health Informatics Theme at the Department of Computer Science, co-lead of the Big Data and Computational Science Theme at the BHF Centre of Excellence at the University of Oxford and co-chair of the Safety Pharmacology Society Biological Modelling working group. She aims to accelerate medical therapy development through augmenting clinical and experimental data with modelling and simulation, and machine learning. Her team has contributed pioneering case studies for the Digital Twin vision in precision medicine, and In Silico Trials for therapy testing. She actively collaborates with industry and leads the Computational Cardiovascular Science team at Oxford, an interdisciplinary, diverse and award-winning research team. Originally, she is from Valencia, Spain, where she trained in Engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (MSc and PhD). She then worked as a postdoc at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA for two years. After this, she joined the University of Oxford, where she has continuously held MRC and Wellcome fellowships since 2007, and was awarded the professorship in Computational Medicine in 2014. 

Title:

'AI-enabled modelling and simulation for drug safety and efficacy evaluation'

Abstract

Precision Medicine aims at providing the most accurate diagnosis and best treatments for each patient. Whereas this has primarily been genomic-centred so far, there is now a wide recognition of the need to consider a wide spectrum of lifestyle, environment, and biology conditions. Characterising such diversity of factors requires large quantity and quality of patients’ datasets, and at the same time, innovative approaches for their analysis, drawing on the increasing power of computers and algorithms. In this presentation, I will illustrate progress towards the vision of the Digital Twin and In Silico Trials for therapy testing, through human-based modelling and simulation for prediction medicine, therapy development, and the 3Rs of animals in research. These concepts are broadly applicable through all areas of medicine, and I will describe our own progress in cardiology and drug safety assessment. I will aim to demonstrate how combined computational approaches, including modelling and simulation and machine learning, can boost the capacity for diagnosis and prognosis, as well as testing of future treatments.  I will also discuss how this research is integrated within the BHF Centre of Research Excellence at Oxford, and other international initiatives. 

Host:

Professor Pablo Lamata

Our series is open to the public and King’s staff and students are encouraged to attend.