Healthy Living: New supercomputers can simulate beating heart at cellular level
Scientists have created a supercomputer that mimics a beating human heart, a technology that may one day revolutionize the way drugs for the heart are created. Cheryl Wills has the story.
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At the sprawling Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, scientists have created supercomputers -- among the largest in the world -- that can simulate the human heart all the way down to the cellular level.
"When your heart beats, it's actually an electric signal that goes around the heart and that causes it to contract," says Fred Streitz, the director of the National Laboratory's High Performance Computing Innovation Center. "How that electric signal transmits around the heart -- we can now model at near cellular resolution, at real time."
Streitz was invited to New York City for the fourth annual Partnering for Cures meeting, where medical researchers gather to turn discoveries into treatments and cures, to demonstrate his simulations.
Streitz's extensive research indicates that the lab's Sequoia Computer technology may be a god send to pharmaceutical companies and could provide critical data before they enter the clinical trial phase.
"Doing it at the cellular level means when you do something like introduce a drug, it's going to interact at a cellular level," Streitz says. "Now you can see how it affects the heartbeat at a cellular level."
The technology is not yet commercially available, but it is believed that these supercomputers will take a lot of the guesswork out of drug development and could one day lead to medicines with fewer side effects.