Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital and its Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice, led by David Bates, are announcing today a collaboration with GNS Healthcare to use supercomputing technology to improve patient care. Cambridge, MA-based GNS Healthcare’s computer-simulation models will be used to predict the likelihood of adverse drug events and hospital readmission in patients with congestive heart failure.

“That’s really just a starting point,” says Tom Neyarapally, senior vice president of corporate development for GNS Healthcare, of the congestive heart failure application. “In the long run the idea is that we will be to do the same type of work across many diseases.”

It’s the first partnership GNS Healthcare has announced regarding work it’s done with healthcare payers, providers, or prescription benefit managers, says Neyarapally. In 2010 Cambridge-based Gene Network Sciences formed the GNS Healthcare subsidiary to focus on applying its computer models in the healthcare space—by helping doctors determine which drugs or combination of drugs will be most successful in patients, and conversely, which will lead to negative reactions. Gene Network Sciences now operates as a subsidiary of Via Science under the name GNS Healthcare.

In the Brigham partnership, GNS Healthcare will take data from the electronic health records of thousands of congestive heart failure patients admitted into the Partners HealthCare system. The aim is to track the relationships between such variables as diagnoses and combinations of drugs patients are taking, and then determine how they might cause an adverse reaction. The technology can also take into consideration the order in which certain diagnoses occurred or drugs were taken—factors that add a new level of complexity to predicting patient outcomes, Neyarapally says. Brigham can then use … Next Page »

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The world of combustion science is much like fluid dynamics, an intense and ever-changing pattern of turbulence, a swirling river of fire and complex chemistry.

So it’s only apropos that San Diego’s Reaction Design, which seemed adrift for a decade or more, now finds itself at a powerful confluence of forces in combustion technology. Increasing environmental restrictions on greenhouse gases and fossil fuels—combined with surging advances in new types of fuels—are opening a huge cleantech opportunity for the software developer’s simulation technology, which models the gaseous chemical reactions that occur in turbines and combustion engines.

To CEO Bernie Rosenthal, the changes have come fast and furious since he joined Reaction Design in early 2005. “Our growth path is such that we could grow at 50 percent a year for the next few years, with no problem,” Rosenthal says. He declines to say just how much revenue the software company is generating, except that it is less than $10 million a year.

Rosenthal told me Reaction Design was founded roughly a decade earlier by David H. Klipstein, a former industrial chemical engineer, following the 1992 acquisition of his previous company, San Diego-based Biosym Technologies. Biosym had developed molecular simulation software that was used by materials and life sciences customers to model chemical reactions.

Simulation of NOx Reactions

Klipstein, who holds a doctorate from MIT, founded Reaction Design to develop software licensed from New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratory. The U.S. government had developed the software to analyze the combustion of rocket fuels, and Klipstein saw the potential to help scientists understand other types of gaseous chemical reactions, especially how byproducts are created during combustion. Rosenthal described the software at that time as “crude academic code that was not very user-friendly.”

The code that evolved into Reaction Design’s “Chemkin” software was primarily designed to analyze combustion processes. But Rosenthal says … Next Page »

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The new five-story building that doubles the size of the San Diego Supercomputer Center is more than just concrete, steel, and glass. As Fran Berman, SDSC director (and an Xconomist) said yesterday, the new building also represents the next generation in supercomputing—and she wants to ensure that San Diego’s emerging companies feel like they’re part of the family.

Berman ostensibly was hosting a dedication ceremony for the SDSC’s $44 million expansion. But the event included breakfast for more than 100 local technology executives, venture capital partners, and others to explain how supercomputing is crunching massive amounts of data to analyze Medicare fraud, cancer cells, earthquakes, and climate change.

Such research may not necessarily be useful to the venture community, but biotech and information technology startups increasingly need such capabilities, especially in digital storage and data mining, and to analyze complex models and simulations.

Today “SDSC sees its role as a partner and pathfinder with the research and education community to harness the power of cyberinfrastructure to adderess science and society’s most critical problems,” Berman said.

The supercomputer center, which was founded on the UCSD campus 23 years ago, now boasts that it has more archival storage capacity than any other academic institution in the world, about 25 petabytes (25 thousand trillion bytes). That’s about 1,000 times the digital plain-text equivalent of the printed collection in the Library of Congress.

The new building also houses some of the first optical networking equipment to be connected to the TeraGrid, a next-generation Internet for scientific research funded by the National Science Foundation.

“I have a number of models where we could work with industry,” said Ron Hawkins, SDSC’s director of industry relations.

The center could conduct sponsored research to address specific questions a company may have, Hawkins said. SDSC researchers also can do “high-end consulting” on corporate projects, or the center can simply offer access to its computational resources.

As one industry consultant noted, however, the programming required to solve complex problems on high-performance computers can be extremely expensive.

“Parallel processing is a specialized field, so, yes, it requires specialized expertise,” Hawkins acknowledged. “But the computing world and the IT world is going to parallel processing, so it’s only appropriate for us to work with industry to bring them along.”

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