empirica congratulates Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel on winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2013, for their work on “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems“. With this prize the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognises not only the extraordinary contribution of the winners to this field, but also the fundamental role that in silico methods and the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Initiative play in contemporary biomedical research, a field to which empirica has been contributing in many projects.
“Computational molecular dynamics leads the way” commented Marco Viceconti, VPH Institute Executive Director. “The Quantum Chemistry/Molecular mechanics first described in the 1976 paper of Warshel and Levitt is a typical example of how computational methods can be cleverly used to explore complex interactions across space-time scale, a fundamental step in unraveling the complexity of living organisms”, according to Viceconti.
Michael Levitt, who joined the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford in 1987 and has a courtesy appointment in computer science, is faculty with the US National Institute of Health funded Stanford University Center for Physics-Based Simulation of Biological Structures (SIMBIOS) network that investigates a wide scale of biological structures: from molecules to organisms. Empirica has collaborated with SIMBIOS and engaged with its research community in the framework of the NMS Physiome project: an EU funded transatlantic cooperation between the FP7 project VPHOP (Osteoporotic Virtual Physiological Human) and the University of Stanford. During the two year long collaboration, empirica has expanded upon its VPHOP project outcomes in the field of innovative health technology assessment through consistent exchange and knowledge transfer with its US Partner University of Stanford.
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