Arun Vivian Holden

(a) The Computational Biology laboratory constructs detailed computer models of muscular organs - the beating heart, and the pregnant uterus - that are based on data from membrane, cell and tissue experiments, and from clinical data. These models are validated by their prediction of normal organ behaviour, and abnormal behaviours seen in disease. They are applied to dissect, in space and time, physiological and pathological mechanism, to prescreen drugs, and to contribute to the drug design and discovery process, and the design of physical interventions.

(b) Most of our research has been in the construction of cardiac virtual tissues, and these are now being applied to biomedical problems. Application areas include the normal pacemaking of the heart and its pharmacological control; the genetic engineering of pacemaking activity in the ventricles, as an alternative to implanted electronic pacemakers; the initiation and control of re-entrant arrhythmias in the atria and ventricles; the effects of drugs on propagation phenomena within the heart; and the effects of electrical and very large magnetic fields on the behaviour of the in situ heart. The same methodology, of developing and applying virtual tissues, is being applied to model uterine activity and possible mechanisms in premature and normal labour.

(c) An important new development has been the extraction of structural data, (geometry, cell orientation) from diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging of tissues; this allows the reconstruction of a 3-D detailed digital map of an organ in a few days, rather than the months-years necessary for histological reconstruction.

Funding Computational Biology Leeds is funded by project, programme and network grants from the BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC, BHF, EU and Sun Microsystems

Regional differences in the electrical activity of SAN tissue (BHF) and acidotic ventricular tissue (BHF)
Engineering virtual cardiac tissue (EPSRC, MRC)
Reentrant arrhythmias and fibrillation (EPSRC)

BA Animal Physiology Oxford 1968
PhD Physiology Alberta 1971
University of Leeds Lecturer in Physiology,1971 Reader in General Physiology ,Professor in Computational Biology 1