The Physiome Project aims to develop, collect, preserve, and disseminate information and integrated understandings of functional biological systems. Going beyond experimentation and observation, the key elements of the project are the databasing of physiological, pharmacological, and pathological information on humans and other organisms and integration through computational modeling. "Models" include everything from diagrammatic schema, suggesting relationships among elements composing a system, to fully quantitative, computational models describing the behavior of physiological systems and an organism's response to environmental change. Each mathematical model is an internally self-consistent summary of available information, and thereby defines a "working hypothesis" about how a system operates. Predictions from such models are subject to test, with new results leading to new models. The behavior of complex biological systems will be gradually revealed through this step-by-step process of building upon and further refining "what is known."
National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) 1981-2003.
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) 2003-present.
Paul Yaeger, Chair, Department of Bioengineering,
McGill
Michigan State
University of Wisconsin
Mayo Clinic
Rice University