United Therapeutics is a biotech company that develops treatments for rare diseases, including diseases affecting the lungs. They use JuliaHub in the cloud to build a computational model of the lung for drug development.

The computational biology group at United Therapeutics combines models at different scales to predict the effect of drugs on organ-level clinical outcomes. For example, United Therapeutics’ computational biologists predict the effect of a vasodilator drug by modeling its effect on biochemical reaction networks within smooth muscle cells, and then combine this with a CFD model of blood flow to predict clinical outcomes such as blood pressure and vascular resistance.

Why do they use JuliaHub?

Computational Lab Director Joe Bender explains:

“In the past, we might have used differential equation solvers in commercial software or Python. But the performance of DifferentialEquations.jl, along with the ability to easily submit jobs to the cloud makes JuliaHub a better choice for us – especially for tasks such as parameter estimation, where parallelization across multiple CPUs is advantageous. Other advantages include the Julia package manager, excellent documentation, and we’ve found that support for JuliaHub is always fast and extremely helpful.”