VirtualBrainCloud · Personalized Recommendations for Neurodegenerative Disease

The annual worldwide cost of Alzheimer’s dementia was 777.81 billion Euro in 2015. This number will rise to 7.41 trillion Euro in 2050. Early diagnosis would save up to $7.9 trillion in medical and care costs by 2050 in the US alone. However, the emergent pathology is highly variable across people, necehighly variable across people, necessitating individualized diagnostics and interventions. The VirtualBrainCloud addresses this by bridging the gap between computational neuroscience and subcellular systems biology, integrating both research streams into a unifying computational model that supports personalized diagnostics and treatments in NDD. TheVirtualBrainCloud not only integrates existing software tools, it also merges the efforts of two big EU initiatives, namely The Virtual Brain large scale simulation platform of the EU Flagship Human Brain Project and IMI-EPAD initiative (European prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia consortium). VirtualBrainCloud will develop and validate a decision support system that provides access to high quality multi-disciplinary data for clinical practice. The result will be a cloud-based brain simulation platform to support personalized diagnostics and treatments in NDD. The EU PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) initiative, will provide the required computing infrastructure. The VirtualBrainCloud will develop robust solutions for legal and ethical matters by interacting with EU projects such as European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), ‘cloud4health’, Alzheimer’s Europe patient organizations and ELIXIR, an organization that manages and safeguards EU research data. Our software developers have already produced highly successful brain simulation and clinical decision support tools. The resulting software will be a cloud based computational modeling system that is tailored to the individual, and bridges multiple scales to identify key mechanisms that predict NDD progression and serves as Precision Decision Support System.