Los Alamos licenses avian flu modeling and simulation software
Santa Fe-based CIVA (The Company for Information Visualization and Analysis) signed an agreement to license Los Alamos National Laboratory’s epidemiological modeling and simulation system, called EpiCast. Developed by Los Alamos scientists Tim Germann, Kai Kadau, and Catherine Macken, EpiCast was designed to help epidemiologists understand the spread and impact of an Avian Influenza (H5N1) pandemic. The system models the pandemic at the individual human level using the most current data on the natural and deliberate spread of pathogens in human populations.
“The EpiCast system is a useful tool for predicting and combating the spread of Avian Flu,” said Duncan McBranch, leader of the Technology Transfer Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We are thrilled to enter into a commercial agreement with CIVA that will allow a private company to take this much-needed technology to market.”
The computer simulation models a synthetic population that matches available census demographics and worker mobility data by randomly assigning the simulated individuals to households, workplaces, schools, and the like. Travel data is used to model long-distance trips during the course of the simulation, realistically capturing the spread of the pandemic virus by airplane and other passenger travel. Additionally, the model of disease transmission involves probabilities that any two people in a population will meet on any given day in any one of a number of settings, such as home or workplace.
Other elements of randomness modify the simulated disease course. A significant fraction of infected people never develop clinical symptoms, although they are themselves infectious. In addition, the durations of the incubation and infectious periods can vary and are randomly chosen from distribution functions for each individual, involving more throws of the virtual dice. With its unprecedented level of detail, EpiCast has been used to evaluate various medical and non-medical mitigation strategies in the event of a pandemic influenza outbreak in the United States.
As a result of its licensing arrangement with the Laboratory, CIVA will be able to run these flu-impact models for government, public, and private organizations as early as this month using a service-centric business model – meaning CIVA will provide customers with modeling results derived from the software, not the software itself. While for-profit enterprises will be charged a fee for this service, the cost to subsidize nonprofit organizations and agencies will come from nonprofit endowments, government grants, and nongovernmental organizations.
“We feel we have a responsibility to humanity to disseminate the modeling as widely and as fast as possible,” said Dr. L. Robert Libutti, CIVA chairman. “We are making every effort to make EpiCast available to any and all organizations that could benefit from the insight the model affords.”
The Company for Information Visualization and Analysis (CIVA), based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was founded to commercialize the great wealth of information visualization and data mining technologies developed at U.S. national laboratories including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, and Pacific Northwest Laboratories. CIVA is backed by private equity and led by Dr. L. Robert (Bob) Libutti.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security. The Laboratory is operated by a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, BWX Technologies, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and global security concerns.
