Application deadline 20 December 2019
A new position for a post-doc researcher is now available at University of Amsterdam to work on In Silico Stroke Trials, as part of the INSIST project. An exciting new emerging application of Computational Biomedicine are in-silico trials, which aim to reduce, refine, or even replace animal studies or (pre-) clinical human trials by simulating medical products or treatments on the population level. INSIST aims to develop in-silico trials for acute ischemic stroke.
Your role will be to integrate models, as developed within the INSIST project, for virtual stroke populations, brain perfusion and metabolism, stroke treatment options (mechanical thrombectomy and thrombolysis), and statistical clinical outcome models into an overall in-silico stroke trial, to validate it on retrospective data from earlier stroke trials, and in collaboration with medical professionals and medical industry, to design and carry out two prospective in-silico stroke trials.
Background
Acute ischemic stroke is a devastating disease. Until 2015 the choice of treatment for stroke patients was limited to thrombolysis. In the last decennium endovascular thrombectomy (EVT), a minimally invasive procedure where the thrombus is mechanically removed by a stent-retriever, was introduced. In 2015 EVT was proven beneficial by the MRCLEAN trial and by 6 subsequent randomized clinical trials. Since then EVT has become then the standard treatment of acute ischemic stroke for occlusions of one of the proximal anterior circulation arteries. However, despite the beneficial effect of thrombectomy, still almost 2 out of 3 patients have an unfavourable outcome and become functionally dependent. Therefore, further improvement of medical products for treatment is still urgently needed, including thrombectomy device design and a new generation of improved thrombolytic therapies that also prevent incomplete microvascular reperfusion.
Because in-silico modelling allows early and fast hypothesis testing and supports trial design, the next generation clinical stroke trials can greatly benefit from in silico clinical stroke trials. This holds the promise that in silico trials enable enhanced efficacy, cost reduction, and speed up the introduction of new therapies, devices, and medication for acute ischemic stroke. With this in mind, the ‘In Silico Clinical Trials for the Treatment of Acute Ischemic stroke’ project (acronym INSIST) was initiated in 2016 and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
The in silico clinical trials for acute ischemic stroke will consist of four main software modules. The first contains the population model to generate virtual populations of stroke patients; the second module will simulate treatment and brain tissue injury; the third module estimates outcome for each individual virtual stroke patient and the final module assembles all results and reports on the outcome.
All detailed models for these modules are under development in laboratories in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Oxford, Galway, and Milano. In collaboration with these labs, you will coarse grain these models and include them in an event-driven coupled model that implements the in-silico stroke trial. You will validate the in-silico trial against pooled data from finalized and ongoing stroke trials. You will work with device industry and pharma, and interventional neurologists, to define and carry out two in-silico trials to test new treatment options.
University of Amsterdam seeks a scientific programmer for advanced applications in relation to Computational Biomedicine, executing on high-end massively parallel computing systems. The main focus will be on the development and maintenance of our software portfolio (for an example see our open-source cellular flow modelling toolkit: www.hemocell.eu) and to contribute to workflows in relation to in-silico clinical trials. The development tasks will include the addition of new, specialized applications of our software. These applications are often embedded in large international projects in cooperation with external partners in Sheffield, London, and Geneva. Further tasks will include supporting our scientific team to realize efficient HPC simulation solutions with these codes.
This position can give grounds to fast professional development in parallel numerical techniques, simulation methods, and application of state-of-the-art computational solutions for large-scale systems.
If you are interested in the job post, full details can be found here
