Having secured funding from the European Commission's Horizon Health Europe initiative, two large-scale, multi-year neuroscience research projects are launching in January 2024.
For both projects, Codemart was granted the leadership role for software and infrastructure development tasks.
Virtual Brain Twin for personalized treatment of Psychiatric Disorders
In the EU, about 165 million people are affected each year by mental disorders. By 2030, estimates are placing mental disorders as the number 1 economic cost factor in medicine. Effectiveness of treatments incl. antipsychotic drugs remains very limited and varies a lot from patient to patient.
Says Viktor Jirsa, project lead at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes in Marseille, France:
“In the Virtual Brain Twin, we take a highly innovative approach combining the latest digital twin technology with AI tools to explain how drugs act upon the brain from the molecule to cognition. The potential impact on psychiatry and the society at large is immense!”
Collaborating with 18 European partners, Codemart focuses on platform integration with these objectives:
Implement a modular, flexible and cohesive software ecosystem to enable the design, modelling, simulation, optimisation, refinement, execution, validation and testing of the virtual brain twin.
Provide software tools to observe, monitor, visualise and share relevant experimental and simulated data at multiple scales used within the definition of the virtual brain twin.
Deploy and operate the software ecosystem on the target high performance computing and secure, GDPR-compliant infrastructures, as well as connect it to other relevant frameworks and repositories.
Provide an open, transparent and easy to trace ecosystem of software tools following best practices insoftware development, ensuring future maintainability and integration into EBRAINS and other European initiatives for virtual twin development platforms, health research and data sharing.
EBRAINS 2.0 – an upgraded digital ecosystem for exploring the brain at various scales
EBRAINS is an open research infrastructure that gathers high-quality research data, tools and computing facilities for brain-related research, built with interoperability at the core.
The infrastructure offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, and access to high-performance computing resources, robotics and neuromorphic platforms to researchers.
The EBRAINS 2.0 project aims to establish a new standard for brain atlases, connect foundational multilevel data, and push forward digital twin approaches through modelling and simulation.
Collaborating with 58 European partners, Codemart focuses on the modelling and simulation part for digital twins with these objectives:
Establish simulation tools for multiscale brain models across species, systems and behaviours.
Provide digital brain twins with modular, configurable, ready-to-use brain model templates for the whole brain and its subsystems, integrated with other EBRAINS tools and services to support a wide range of scientific use cases.
Enable and facilitate the use of multiscale brain models by providing integrated tools for analysis, visualisation, validation and inference of digital brain twins.
Maximise usability of multiscale brain models and digital brain twins.
Define clear procedures, technical requirements and interfaces to enable the larger community to contribute modelling and simulation tools to EBRAINS in the future.