NEWS LABORATORY INFORMATICS Cytel has appointed Dr Kyle Wathen


Bayesian clinical trial design specialist Dr Kyle Wathen has joined Cytel as vice president of scientific strategy and innovation. Dr Wathen has more than 20 years’


experience in innovative adaptive clinical trial design and was a major contributor to the first adaptive platform trial – I-SPY2 – which helped to establish an ‘adaptive’ clinical trial model. He will support the ongoing maturation


of Cytel’s Solara and East Bayes software. These solutions play a key role in Cytel’s reshaping of clinical development, removing critical roadblocks, and making complex innovative trial designs more accessible. ‘The growing adoption of complex


designs – facilitated by enabling tools like East and Solara – is a momentous step forward for the industry,’ said Dr Wathen. ‘I’m dedicated to further elevating


Cytel’s innovative design arsenal and empowering customers to carve a smoother, more efficient path to market. My priority will be the maturation of Solara – a radical new tool that eliminates siloed decision-making for quicker identification of the best design. This is the future of clinical strategy – a leap from traditional, cumbersome clinical trial design selection processes.’ The rapid pace of drug development and the urgency of getting new medicines to market means drug developers are exploring innovative clinical trial designs


to reap the benefits of reduced study duration, better decision-making and minimised costs. But such designs have traditionally been


off-limits to smaller biotechs, as they are difficult to implement, require powerful computing power, and rely on deep statistical expertise for execution. The appointment of Dr Wathen


represents the latest step in Cytel’s journey of providing more equitable access to Bayesian expertise, and follows the recent acquisition of Bayesian trial design and implementation specialists Laiya Consulting, co-founded by renowned biostatistician Professor Yuan Ji. Dr Wathen has rich experience in academia, consulting and industry.


HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING HPC improves engine cooling innovation for SMEs


Advanced Innovative Engineering (AIE), an SME based in Lichfield, UK, will use HPC resources from PRACE to improve the development of rotary engines for unmanned vehicles. The 12th PRACE Shape call generated


16 proposals. One was taken forward from AIE, which specialises in the development of rotary engines for unmanned vehicles. Over the next few months, domain


experts at AIE will collaborate with HPC experts at the STFC Hartree Centre to develop and refine AIE’s simulations to make cooling improvements to power units using HPC.


AIE manages entire project life


cycles through concept, prototype and production. Working with international partners and customers, it creates technologies that combine low total- cost-of-ownership (TCO) with exceptional reliability and versatility for commercial and defence markets. Key to achieving a highly power-dense and simple air-cooled engine is the ability of the required heat exchange area of the engine (fin or cooling pack) to reject the heat from the engine to the atmosphere as efficiently as possible. Due to the large number of design and


parameter iterations required to achieve an optimised heat exchanger design, sheer computing power becomes a significant factor in reaching a prototype design in reasonable timescales. This is where HPC comes in. A dedicated AIE technical expert


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will collaborate with STFC specialists to develop and refine suitable mesh representations of candidate heat exchangers to facilitate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) computations at scale on an HPC platform. The computations will involve the open source software OpenFOAM, which already runs efficiently on HPC platforms. From these simulations, the


performance of candidate heat exchanger designs will be determined with precision. All results will be validated against


experimental data. The Thirteenth Call for Applications to Shape (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) closes on 1 June. PRACE invites applications from


European SMEs with an interesting idea that would benefit from HPC to increase their competitiveness. PRACE is funded by the PRACE members. The implementation phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020).


Spring 2021 Scientific Computing World 37


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