The major challenges for the health system for the coming decade, such as personalised medicine, ageing of the population, migration and mobility, systems for prevention and early diagnosis and overcoming chronic diseases, require the type of integrated research that the VPH initiative seeks to promote.

The Virtual Physiological Human Institute for Integrative Biomedical Research, or VPH Institute, was established on 24 March2011 in Leuven (Belgium); the process of incorporation was completed in mid-May and it began operating as a non-profit organisation in Belgium last June.

Alejandro Frangi, research professor at the ICREA-Academy of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) is a member of the Steering Committee, and the first General Assembly of the VPH Institute is scheduled to be held at Pompeu Fabra University on 28 September.

A consolidated initiative covering research and clinical practice

The VPH Institute's mission to ensure that the vision of the Virtual Physiological Human becomes a reality that is adopted internationally and used effectively in both research and clinical practice.

The VPH initiative began in 2005, and was created by a group of European researchers, including Alejandro Frangi, Director of the CISTIB, the DTIC research group at UPF, who were interested in applying predictive models in biomedicine. The VPH initiative is inspired by the Physiome project, and is focused on developing methodologies and technologies that make it possible to investigate human body as a whole unit.

The STEP cordinated action provided support for the completion of the first research roadmap produced as part of this project, which involved more than three hundred experts from around the world. From that point, the VPH community expanded rapidly until it included more than two thousand researchers and over two hundred million euros in competitive research projects.

The VPH HPV is currently supported by the 7th Framework Programme, both as a European network of excellence in which UPF has played a major role with over thirty research projects, including six large-scale integrated projects with significant involvement by UPF and other Catalan and Spanish bodies.

A project involving the sum of a great deal of knowledge

Life is the result of a complex system of interactions that involve many processes that occur at different scales in space and time. Biomedical research and clinical practice produce a vast wealth of information on these processes every day.

However, this information is extremely fragmented and bringing it together is one of the researchers' goals. The scientific community therefore requires tools to make the wealth of information generated by knowledge intelligible, as this information is increasing exponentially as time passes.

That is why it is necessary to develop a new approach that integrates all this information while simplifying it to transform it into knowledge. Virtual Physiological Human, VPH, is a methodological framework thatwill enable the study of the human body as a unit once it has been properly established and validated.

The VPH initiative therefore requires the multidisciplinary contribution of various disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, physiology and medicine.

In the short and medium term, the need to consolidate integrative biomedical research will also require the establishment of an academic curriculum, the publication of scientific journals and the establishment of international conferences, scientific societies and international awards.

It will also be necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developments based on the VPH paradigm in medical practice, and to ensure the necessary visibility in both the research field and in society in general.