The Living Human Project is a grass-roots initiative aimed at developing an in silico model of the human neuromusculoskeletal system that can predict how mechanical forces are exchanged internally and externally, from the whole body down to the protein level, consistently with scope of the European Virtual Physiological Human initiative.
To pursue this very ambitious objective, it is necessary for large research communities to share highly heterogeneous collections of data and models through a repository fully integrated, and directly accessible by any researcher in the world. Although inspired by the neuromusculoskeletal research community, this problem is very general, and its solution will significantly and positively affect European research, clinical and industrial practices.

The Living Human Digital Library was a three-years research project that aimed to develop this infrastructure, and to populate it with the world-first collection of data on the musculoskeletal systems specifically designed for multiscale modelling of this important organ system. The project was completed last January, and received very positive evaluations by the panel of international experts that reviewed its results.

Now the ICT for Health unit of the DGINFSO showcase the LHDL project as “project of the month”. The message is: “Thanks to the LHDL project, it is now possible to share biomedical data in an easy, controlled, safe, and financially viable way. With the PhysiomeSpace© service it takes three clicks from the upload of the data to their sharing”. A two-pages leaflet summarise the most important results of the project, and provides details on the PhysiomeSpace© service, now running in beta.

The VPHOP integrated project will use the PhysiomeSpace infrastructure and services in a number of specific activities. Due to the solid security model that the commercial version of PhysiomeSpace -- scheduled to start operations on 2010 -- ensures, this platform will be used to share across the consortium the anonymised data of the patients involved in the clinical trials that will run in four hospitals in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. The collaborative services and the selective data sharing mechanisms will be used to share data and models between small groups of researchers within the consortium that are working together remotely. Last, but not least, a large part of the data collected during the LHDL project will be used as a first basis and benchmarking data for the various modelling activities planned in the VPHOP project.