Insigneo Institute for in silico Medicine

About Insigneo

The Insigneo Institute for in silico (also known as ‘computational’) Medicine is Europe’s largest research institute dedicated entirely to the development, validation, and use of in silico medicine technologies. The institute has over 140 academics and clinicians drawn from 28 departments within our parent institutions, the University of Sheffield, and the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Our mission in Insigneo is to perform cutting edge research in areas of fundamental and applied biomedical modelling, imaging and informatics, so implementing the scientific ambition behind the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH), and transforming healthcare.

Our big question is how can we best deliver universal healthcare in a world of 10 billion? We have reached a stage in medicine where we have to face complexity in order to advance any further. 15 years ago in silico medicine did not exist, today it is poised to start a revolution in healthcare.

Increasingly sophisticated computer programmes can be used to augment clinical trials by predicting the effects of all the biological variability that makes people different to one another.

Accurately modelling the variability between people, and how they might differently respond to certain treatment means that researchers can evaluate how robust their clinical trial designs are. This could speed up the process of getting new treatments into clinical use by reducing the size of clinical trials required to test them.