Using Virtual Skin and Tissue Modeling to Accelerate Development of Novel Therapies and Devices

Sara Dutta, Ph.D., Business Consultant – Life Sciences Industry, Dassault Systèmes

Sara Dutta is a Business Consultant for the Life Sciences Industry at Dassault Systèmes. She is based at the US headquarters in Waltham, MA. Her aim is to leverage her expertise and the strength of the Dassault Systèmes platform to help pharmaceutical and medical device companies innovate and transform their businesses.

Prior to joining Dassault Systèmes, over the last 7 years, Sara specialized in computational modeling to investigate arrhythmia mechanisms and drug effects on the heart. She worked for 3 years as an ORISE research fellow at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where she led work on developing computational techniques to assess cardiac safety and efficacy for the Comprehensive in Vitro Proarrhythmia Assay (CiPA) initiative. As part of a wider collaborative effort, she worked closely with experts from the FDA, academia and industry.

Prior to working at the FDA, she completed her PhD in Professor Blanca Rodriguez’s multi-disciplinary research group, the Computational Cardiovascular Science Team, at the University of Oxford (UK). Sara is passionate about the strength of software and computational modeling to transform and enhance the life sciences industry, and eventually improve the patient’s life and experience.

Jiang Yao, Ph.D., Technical Specialist Life, Sciences Industry, Dassault Systèmes

She performed postdoctoral researches in computational simulation of cardiac morphogenesis in chick embryo and material modeling of plaque tissues using intravascular elastography. Jiang also lectured linear and nonlinear finite elements for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Rochester in 2010.

She joined Dassault Systemes in 2011 as a technical specialist supporting Virtual Human Modeling activities and deliverables on human modeling and simulations and also developed musculoskeletal models for the upper and lower extremities, material databases and finite element models for various human organs and tissues. She is the main developer for the Living Heart Human Model (LHHM) since 2017. Her major contribution on the Living Heart Human Model is the addition of valves and coronaries and implementation of the advanced electrophysiological model that enables Living Heart Human Models to investigate cardiac toxicity of drugs.