Development of a virtual high performance software laboratory for nanotherapy simulation

• Grant number: 17/22876-6
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Innovative Research in Small Business - PIPE
• Start date: September 01, 2018
• End date: May 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Walter Humberto Zavala Cárdenas
• Grantee: Walter Humberto Zavala Cárdenas
• Company: Geoondas Inovações Geofísicas e Big Data Ltda
• CNAE: Desenvolvimento de programas de computador sob encomenda ; Pesquisa e desenvolvimento experimental em ciências físicas e naturais ; Atividades de serviços de complementação diagnóstica e terapêutica
• City: São Paulo
• Associated scholarship(s): 18/22102-3 - Development of a virtual laboratory of software of high performance for nanotherapies simulation, BP.TT; 18/21988-8 - Development of a virtual laboratory of software of high performance for nanotherapies simulation, BP.PIPE

Abstract

Recently there has been a lot of interest in the scientific and business community in cloud computing to meet new challenges of increasingly demanding computing requirements and for the treatment of increasingly bulky data. In addition to cluster and grids computing infrastructures, focused primarily on high-performance scientific simulations, cloud computing is also providing high-performance computing resources with high scalability, storage and dynamism. This flexibility of allocation of computing resources is what most attracts leading scientific and business communities to migrate their applications to the cloud paradigm. The application of Information Technology (IT) in medicine is projected as one of the promising tools in the near future of the planning and monitoring of the development of therapeutic processes through the modeling, simulation and computational optimization of biomodels. The modeling of the processes involved during a therapy; such as: Heat Transfer, Molecular Dynamics, Tumor Growth, Tumor Cell Marking, among others, can be obtained, if described by a mathematical formula, being in most cases possible through a Partial Differential Equation (EDP). Applying numerical methods to solve the EDP, we obtain a system of linear or nonlinear equations that are solved computationally looking for the unknowns of the system. Simulating a therapeutic process as realistic as possible leads to a huge computational expense, so that in most situations it becomes necessary to use high performance computing infrastructures and IT development aimed at this type of architectures, in order to guarantee acceptable execution times of simulations. The proposal of this project provides new nanotechnological tools and high performance IT for application to medicine. With a long-term perspective, the development of a virtual cloud laboratory of a collection of routines and software based on parallel processing via CPU and GPU for the simulation, optimization, planning and monitoring of nano-therapies, as well as for the design and evaluation of new nanomaterials in medicine, specifically in oncology medicine. By enabling academic/business institutions, startups, scientists, engineers, physicians, and autonomous researchers to leverage their applied nanotechnology research/projects to produce important nanotechnological advances in health that have directly impacted people's quality of life. The development of the nanotechnology area is in a phase of growth and has captured the interest of companies, institutions, governments and investors interested in finding and developing new properties and applications of nanomaterials in the different spheres, especially in the medical field. a promising market in which our project fits perfectly and should contribute to the development of Brazil within the perspectives of the Saúde 4.0 program directed to this innovative nanotechnological area. For this first phase, we intend to demonstrate the feasibility of scientific cloud computing, developing software for the simulation, planning and monitoring of Magnetic Hyperthermia (MH) nanotherapy for the treatment of tumors. The important advances in IT, proposed here, to be achieved, should contribute to the development of diagnostic systems and therapeutic treatments for the improvement of people's quality of life, contributing to important advances in medical technology and health in Brazil. Thus, the present research, development and innovation (RD&I) project is proposed: Development of a virtual high-performance software laboratory for simulation of nanotherapies. (AU)