In August, 4 people from ISB group were in Copenhagen to participate in the “Nordic Ooc/MPS summer workshop”. MPS stands for Microphysiological Systems, and it is another name for experimental models such as organoids, spheroids, organs-on-a-chip, etc. We have been working together with AstraZeneca to develop digital twins for such models for many years, and for this reason we were invited to give two(!) keynote presentations at this event.
The first keynote was held jointly by Oscar Silfvergren from our side, and Liisa Vilén at AstraZeneca. Liisa leads their MPS team, and she and Oscar work tightly regarding modelling, planning of new experiments, etc. They gave a presentation on their collaboration and on the recently submitted project manuscript on multi-scale and multi-species, mechanistic models for MPS and exenatide.
Apart from this, Gunnar Cedersund gave the morning and opening keynote for the second half of the workshop: a hackathon on digital twins for MPS. This second half was a whole-day event to learn the basics of what digital twins are, why they are useful (in medicine, drug development, and for MPS), and also the basics on how to do such digital twin models, via a hands-on computer lab. All participants (38 signed up Ph.D. students and researchers), also had the option of bringing their own data, and getting started on a new project regarding the creation of a model for their own research data and question. Quite a few participants made use of this possibility, and several new collaborations and modelling projects were born during this event.
On the whole, this was a fun, interesting, and useful event arranged by the Nordic network for Organs-on-a-chip, the EU project Open Mind, and their eminent coordinator Jenny Emneus.
