GE Global Research, the technology development arm for the General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), announced today a two-year, $1.1 million collaboration with the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI) to develop a physiologically based “virtual human.” This collaboration is supported by a contract awarded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense.

The so-called Biotic Man project will involve the design of a computer model that could dramatically speed drug design in response to the threat of biological attacks on the battlefield or in domestic situations. The project will advance a software program originally developed by GE Global Research. This Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) software tool uses computational models to measure a drug’s response in the body long before clinical trials.

GE researchers will adapt the PBPK tool to computationally model the impact of bacterial, viral and other infectious agents on the human body. The modified tool will simulate the response of new antibiotic or antiviral drug therapies to a specific threat. In addition, the tool will be designed to accurately represent the physiological changes in a critically ill patient suffering from burns, trauma, or recent surgery to help evaluate the effectiveness of the drug therapy under the various conditions it might be administered.

“GE’s Biotic Man project is all about speed. The goal is to enable faster development of drugs to respond to new biological threats,” said John Graf, Principal Investigator on the project for GE Global Research. “This new software tool also could have broad impact across the pharmaceutical industry, helping to accelerate efforts to develop new drug remedies at substantially reduced costs.”

“This new, enhanced software tool will enable researchers to test and develop new drug therapies in a virtual, safer environment with better quantitative information,” Graf added.

The main obstacles to faster, more efficient drug development today are challenges with safety and the inability to predict drug failures earlier, before human testing or even in initial stage clinical trials. These limitations also can lead to dramatically higher testing costs. Gains in productivity and potential cost savings may be achieved from better decisions based on quantitative information, identification of lead compounds, and more effective trials.

GE’s vision of “Early Health” is focused on enabling the earlier diagnosis of disease and providing more effective ways to diagnose, treat and manage patients. The development of new software tools for drug development also illustrates the growing convergence of diagnostics and therapeutics. Tools such as the Biotic Man can provide valuable insight and data to pharmaceutical companies about new disease states and how their drugs will respond to them.