Training network to advance integrated computational simulations in translational medicine, applied to intervertebral disc degeneration: Disc4All.

Jérôme Noailly will coordinate a consortium of 11 beneficiaries, complemented by eight partner organizations, Disc4All aims to address this problem through the collaborative experience of physicians; physicists and computational biologists; geneticists; computer scientists; cell and molecular biologists; microbiologists; bioinformaticians; and industrial partners. Only at UPF, research will cover various topics such as data science and machine learning, medical image analysis and processing and computational biology and biomechanics, thanks to the joint supervision by Gemma Piella, Miguel Ángel González Ballester and Jérôme Noailly, all principal investigators of the BCN MedTech research unit. The project also addresses the importance of the role of the society in promoting new medical technologies.

Disc4All aims to integrate available data and computational simulations on back pain caused by intervertebral disc degeneration with a multidisciplinary translational medicine approach. On the one hand, the unique population cohort data from Twins UK (King’s College London) and from the Northern Finland Birth Cohorts (University of Oulu) will be exploited to generate matching sets of molecular profiles and specific intervertebral disc phenotype. On the other hand, cell and organ culture laboratory experiments will be used to pinpoint the most likely relationships among molecular profiles and cell microenvironments. Computer simulations will integrate these population and experimental data, to predict the cell microenvironments through multiscale modelling, and to extract the causality between the emergence of specific molecular activity and specific intervertebral disc phenotypes.Finally, data mining and artificial intelligence techniques will generate interpretable correlation models between measurable clinical data and unmeasurable, but predicted, key regulators of cell and molecular activities. The final output shall be identification of rational patient-specific maps of concurring risk factors.

See the full UPF news here.

META WIRELESS, coordinated by the Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT),

Wireless connectivity has become a pillar of our society. The growth in wireless traffic is unstoppable and is forecast to reach 5,016 exabytes by 2030, with bit rates of the order of 1Tb/s and new services related to detection, localization, low latency and ultra-reliability. While the performance of wireless networks has improved dramatically in recent decades, advances and mechanisms that have maintained these huge improvements are starting to dwindle.

Until now, all wireless systems have respected the premise that the radio propagation channel is set by nature and cannot be altered and that it can only be compensated through increasingly sophisticated transmission/reception systems. A potential turning point for 6G networks and beyond is to move away from this hypothesis.

With this vision, MetaWireless pursues the disruptive idea of designing wireless networks using the environment as something capable of being controlled and optimized. The manipulation of the wireless environment can be enabled by incorporating reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.

See the full UPF news here.