The mission of ViroLab is to develop a virtual laboratory for infectious diseases. In future years, genetic information is expected to become increasingly significant in many areas of medicine. This expectation comes from the recent and anticipated achievements in genomics, which provide an unparalleled opportunity to advance the understanding of the role of genetic factors in human health and disease, to allow more precise definition of the non-genetic factors involved, and to apply this insight rapidly to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Three main classes of ViroLab users have been identified: members of the medical scientific community, computer scientists, and industry or commercial users.

The virtual laboratory is a set of integrated components that, used together, form a distributed and collaborative space for science. Multiple, geographically-dispersed laboratories and institutes use the virtual laboratory to plan, and perform experiments as well as share their results.The term experiment in this context means a so-called in-silico experiment - that is, a process that combines data and computations in order to obtain new knowledge on the subject of an experiment. Here we introduce a virtual laboratory that is built for the ViroLab Project. In this scope the laboratory is prepared to support virologists, epidemiologists and clinicians investigating the HIV virus and the possibilities of treating HIV-positive patients. Although the ViroLab Virtual Laboratory is being built specifically for this domain of science, the conceptual solutions and the technology developed could be reused for other domains.

Past events:

• October 12 - October 14, 2009
  Cracow Grid Workshop (CGW), Krakow, Poland, October 12 - October 14, 2009. More information: http://www.cyfronet.pl/cgw09/
• September 16 - September 18, 2009
  International Conference on Computational Bioengineering, Bertinoro (Forlì), Italy, September 16 - September 18, 2009. More information: http://www.iccb2009.org
• August 24 - August 25, 2009
  A presentation entitled ViroLab Security and Virtual Organization Infrastructure will be given at the 8th international Conference on Advanced Parallel Processing Technologies, 24-25 August 2009, Rapperswil, Switzerland. More information: http://www.appt09.com/