The future of healthcare is digital

 

3 Minute read

An expert in computational physiology, Associate Professor Vijay Rajagopal uses computational models to understand how biological systems work and to create new solutions for problems in biology, healthcare and MedTech.

Associate Professor Rajagopal leads the Digital Health and Simulation Technologies research theme as part of the University of Melbourne MedTech industry platform.

Vijay Rajagopal is a middle-aged Indian man with brown skin and short black hair. He wears glasses and a speckled grey pullover over a collared shirt.

The future of healthcare is digital, from managing patient health records to developing patient-specific treatments. The Digital Health and Simulation Technologies theme brings together stakeholders and innovators across healthcare, science and engineering to develop digital solutions to significant problems in patient management, telemedicine, precision medicine, surgical planning, drug discovery and medical education.

Everything we do at universities is in partnership. Biomedical problems are complex and need the convergence of multiple disciplines to solve problems. We have a depth of experience and a breadth of expertise at the University of Melbourne to come together and solve big problems.

We are keen to build partnerships with industry in digital health and simulation. These technologies have potential impact in pharmaceuticals, health data management and early intervention. We seek to partner with industry across the discovery-translation pipeline so that we can make positive impact on healthcare management and improve patient outcomes.

The benefit of working with universities for industry is securing your next market. The university environment supports researchers to work on long-term questions.

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Working with a university, industry will have access to deep and broad expertise that this environment cultivates. And that can help you innovate and protect your leadership in industry or find your next market. Associate Professor Vijay Rajagopal

At universities, we're not just doing curiosity-driven research – there's a reason to that curiosity, too. I’m currently working on computational models of the heart. Your heart grows when you exercise and when you're pregnant. But it also grows in some diseases like blocked arteries – and in the worst cases that can lead to heart failure. We don't know how to recover a failing heart. That makes me curious about what makes the heart grow.

When you go to a GP with a heart problem, they’ll take a lot of measurements – but they’re all just tiny windows into what your heart is doing. They'll look at your heart rate and your blood pressure. But these are only two aspects of the heart rather than the whole system. If they need more information, they’ll collect CT scans, echocardiograms and anything else that will guide their decisions. What do these different measurements mean for the health of your heart?

Currently, integrating all of these measurements is hard. Computational models can join all these data to create a digital twin to assess that patient’s health in an integrated sense.

We’re in the era for big data in biology, which allows us to build more sophisticated models. For example, we’re working towards a digital twin of heart muscle cells so that we can integrate molecular information into digital twins of the heart. Associate Professor Vijay Rajagopal
Vijay with members of his research group: two white men and a brown-skinned woman. All beam at the camera with conference lanyards around their necks.

We want to form long-term partnerships where the industry’s vision aligns with ours. By partnering with us in digital health and simulation, industry can get involved in computational and digital health research early and help shape its utility for maximum impact in their market. For example, if you are a pharmaceutical company, investing in a partnership with us on computational drug discovery can help you find the likelihood that your drug will be clinically approved. And although the end-goal of the partnership may seem far away, it will lead to solutions for pressing near-term challenges as they arise, like enhancing in-house biological data analysis pipelines.

First published on 20 May 2025.

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