Integration from proteins to organs: the IUPS Physiome Project

Abstract

The IUPS Physiome Project 1 1 IUPS is the International Union of Physiological Sciences ( www.iups.org) and the IUPS Physiome Project is run under the auspices of the IUPS Physiome and Bioengineering Committee, co-chaired by the first author and Prof. Aleksander Popel. is an internationally collaborative open source project intended to provide a public domain framework for computational physiology, including the development of modeling standards, computational tools and web-accessible databases of models of structure and function at all spatial scales and across all organ systems. Here, we illustrate the application of this multi-scale modeling approach to three organ systems: the heart, the lungs and the musculo–skeletal system, and in each case we show how the organ level models incorporate tissue and cell-level physiology. Although the computational physiology framework presented here does not yet incorporate models of ageing processes, the model-based approach is certainly capable of describing ageing and disease-related processes both via parameter changes within the models of normal physiological processes and via models of additional processes added to the framework.