Sep 6, 2022
IT’IS Receives o²S²PARC Year 6 Award
IT’IS has received the year 6 award to continue development of the o2S2PARC platform under the NIH SPARC program. Over the next 12 months, we will continue to further advance the platform and work towards a broad user base and long-term sustainability.
Great progress has been made in the last five years in establishing a unique modeling and simulation platform as part of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s “Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions” SPARC program. The goal of the program is to identify neural targets and accelerate the development of therapeutic devices that modulate electrical activity in the vagus and other nerves to help treat diseases and conditions such as hypertension and gastrointestinal disorders by precisely adjusting organ function.
Our “Open Platform for Online Simulations for Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions” (o2S2PARC) is one of the four pillars of the SPARC Data and Resource Center and provides modeling and simulation capabilities as its core function. o2S2PARC allows collaborative development and sharing, model coupling and cloud-based execution, and data visualization and analysis, and ensures sustainability of the computational models developed within SPARC. The platform enables users to create predictive, multiscale, multi-physics models ranging from modulation sources that act on the peripheral nervous system (PNS) to the resulting modulation of organ functional response.
During the last year, o2S2PARC has seen a sharp increase in the number of users and hosted projects, as well as in the projects’ size and complexity. A range of consortia have chosen o2S2PARC to host their collaborative modeling, and the first treatment planning tools have been developed, which are close to release. During year 6, the IT’IS team will continue the ongoing maintenance of the o2S2PARC platform and to harden and increase stability and scalability to accommodate increased use. The next 12 months will be crucial for ensuring a broad user base and long-term sustainability. Integration with the SPARC data, maps, and knowledge management will be tightened and a dedicated effort will be made to increase the attractiveness of o2S2PARC and other SPARC resources to application developers.
Whether you are an individual researcher or a program or project funder interested in the PNS, we encourage you to consider using SPARC when planning your study or project.
Check out the SPARC Portal for access to digital resources that can be shared, cited, visualized, computed, and used for virtual experimentation!
