Towards Innovative Healthcare Grid Solutions: ViroLab - A Virtual Laboratory for Infectious Diseases

With more rare and critical diseases, medical diagnoses and disease prevention constitutes one of the challenging and at the same time most difficult fields in modern health care. Using interdisciplinary approaches where different areas of research such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science meet together in order to analyze, understand and reconstruct complex medical processes, those projects typically achieve excellent research results but are inefficientand unfeasible for daily medical workflows. The EU funded project ViroLab should address this important issue by combining different scientists together into one project in order to design and develop a working platform for researchers and especially for doctors, which facilitates medical knowledge discovery and decision support for HIV drug resistance for daily clinical usage. In this paper, we will present the overall concept of the ViroLab project. The core functionalities will be described in detail and shall give the readers an idea of an innovative system for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment based on integrated biomedical data and information on several levels.