With the virus spreading so fiercely, new data has been emerging rapidly. This has made it hard to accurately simulate how it travels, both through individual biology and across populations. Hadean’s spatial simulation solution, Aether Engine, will be used to develop large-scale models and generate real-time analysis, assisting governments and health organisations in their decision-making processes.

The work will build on a successful project Dr Paul Bates and his team completed with Hadean on protein-protein interactions in 2019, as well as Hadean’s early investigations into COVID-19 contagion modelling.

Craig Beddis, co-founder and CEO at Hadean, said “COVID-19 presents a massive, fast-moving challenge across the globe, and it is vital that experts are able to apply their knowledge and specialisms to finding ways of fighting the pandemic. Dr Bates and the team at the Francis Crick Institute have critical knowledge that must be applied to this battle, and we are providing the tools that enable them to best deploy their expertise to develop accurate insights, helping our leaders make the right decisions.”

Dr Paul Bates stated “I’m very excited about The Crick’s collaboration with Hadean. We believe our algorithms will have future applications in the advent of other virus-driven epidemics, predicting the consequences and protocols that governments could adopt to help save lives.” He continued, “Gaining access to parallel compute expertise and Aether Engine will be critical to how we model SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Simulations developed on Aether Engine will enable us to significantly speed up predictions on how the virus interacts in humans.”

Based in London, the Francis Crick Institute is dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease, and currently stands as the biggest biomedical research facility under a single roof in Europe.