Industrial Engineering and Translational Medicine: The Role of Modeling

A novel approach is becoming the mainstream in medicine, bringing the engineering approach in the early stages of investigations in pharmacology and biomedical science: the so-called “translational medicine”. It has been defined as the process of turning appropriate biological discoveries into drugs and medical devices that can be used in the treatment of patients. The translational medicine is based on the cooperative efforts of different disciplines, all aimed at the same objective: to follow the full path of a novel therapeutic tool “from the bench to bedside”. During the first phase of a translational research, the aim is the translation of non-human research findings, from the laboratory and from animal studies, into therapies for patients. In this field, the industrial engineers (particularly, chemical engineers and biomedical engineers) usually play a main role. One of the most relevant tool commonly used by engineers, and usually not available to medical and pharmaceutical researchers is the mathematical modeling, i.e. the use of properly written equations to describe the physical reality. In the following, some of the most relevant achievement of my research group was briefly summarized, in order to emphasize the relevance of mathematical modeling in translational medicine studies