Computational modeling and simulation at the heart of future pharmacology and medicine
Date: 2022/06/30 - 2022/06/30
Academic Seminar: Computational modeling and simulation at the heart of future pharmacology and medicine
Speaker: Dr. Haibo Ni, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology, University of California Davis
Time: 9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m., June 30th, 2022 (Beijing Time)
Location: via Feishu
Abstract
Cardiac arrhythmias, i.e., heart rhythm disorders, are associated with numerous cardiovascular comorbidities and mortality, accounting for 10% to 15% of all deaths. The overall prevalence of arrhythmias exceeds 3% and increases dramatically with age, having significant implications for aging societies. However, the therapeutic options are limited in efficacy and often fraught with adverse effects, while our mechanistic understanding of the disease remains incomplete. Biophysically detailed mechanistic modeling has been instrumental in deciphering complex mechanisms of arrhythmias and demonstrates enormous potentials for preclinical drug screening and therapeutic optimization. Here, I will introduce approaches to construct integrative, multiscale, and multiphysics models of the heart to bridge basic research and clinical practices. I will elaborate how we apply these models to integrate and mechanistically dissect disease mechanisms and constitute virtual drug screening platforms to identify systems pharmacological approaches for arrhythmias. I will conclude by discussing avenues of assembling mechanistic and machine learning models with human-like cell technology, and clinical imaging and electrophysiology: integrating these technologies offers tremendous opportunities to transform next-generation preclinical drug discovery paradigm and build digital twins of the heart towards precision medicine in cardiology.
Biography
Dr. Haibo Ni is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology, University of California Davis. Dr. Ni received his Ph.D. degree in Biological Physics from the University of Manchester, UK, in 2017, after obtaining his B.E. (2010) and M.E. (2012) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Since October 2017, Dr. Ni has been undertaking his postdoctoral training with Prof. Eleonora Grandi’s lab at University of California Davis. Dr. Ni’s research interests involve building multiscale and multiphysics models of the heart that bridge and augment basic (wet lab) and clinical research, and explore their applications for defining novel and personalized therapeutic strategies. Dr. Ni is a recipient of the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dean’s Award at the University of Manchester, the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Studying Overseas, and multiple conference travel awards. He is a guest associate editor for Frontiers in Physiology and regularly reviews manuscripts for more than 15 mainstream international research journals. Furthermore, Dr. Ni served twice as a member of the grant review committee for the American Heart Association research fellowship programs.