21 November 2011: The ITFoM project will present outcomes and achievements of the past six months at the FET Flagship Midterm Conference and Exhibition in Warsaw

The ITFoM project will present outcomes and achievements of the past six months at the FET Flagship Midterm Conference and Exhibition in Warsaw on 24-25 November. The conference will also provide a forum for bilateral discussions between all six Flagship Pilots, European Commission's representatives, national funding agencies and other stakeholders.

European Future Technologies (FET) Flagships are large-scale, science-driven and mission oriented initiatives that aim to achieve visionary technological goals. To prepare the launch of the two FET Flagships, six Pilot Actions are being funded with 1.5 million Euros each for a 12-month period that started in May 2011. In the second half of 2012, two of the Pilots will be selected and launched as full FET Flagship Initiatives in 2013. As one of the six Pilot Actions, the ITFoM project will present its objectives and expected impact on science, technology and society.

ITFoM aims to create a computer model, a "virtual patient", by developing general models of human pathways, tissues, and ultimately of the whole human. Medicine based on molecular, physiological, anatomical and environmental data from individual patients will enable physicians to identify personalised prevention schedules, therapies and potential effects on individual patients. The potential benefits are enormous in terms of reduction of healthcare costs as well as for each individual patient: identification of efficient drug combinations on an individual basis; substantial advances in disease prevention and treatment; better data access and use for health professionals, healthcare systems, and researchers.

Such data-rich medicine poses unprecedented challenges for ICT - in terms of hardware, storage and communication - and requires fundamental advances in the computational sciences. Thus academic groups from a range of research backgrounds joined forces with their industry-based colleagues in making ITFoM a reality. As a result, ITFoM brings together 51 partners and associated members from the whole of Europe and beyond, including world leading academic institutes and multinational companies such as Siemens, Illumina, IBM, Intel, XEROX, Oracle, Roche, Life Technologies and Agilent.

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