Whole Person Physiome Program

NIH grant launches Whole Person Physiome Program

A visionary new NIH grant is bringing together a national network of researchers to launch the Whole Person Physiome Research and Coordination Center (WPP-RCC) — a bold effort to digitize our knowledge of the human body and transform it into dynamic models that advance both clinical care and biomedical research.

The initiative will harness expertise in precision medicine, integrative physiology, big data, data visualization, computation, and resource building to create the first comprehensive map of the “healthy” male and female body. By coordinating across multiple disciplines and institutes, the WPP-RCC will lay the groundwork for analyzing inter-organ communication and complex human physiology at an unprecedented scale.

The WPP-RCC is supported by 21 NIH institutes and offices as part of the NIH Whole Person Initiative, and is overseen by The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. The effort will be led by Michael Snyder, PhD (Stanford School of Medicine), Katy Börner, PhD (Indiana University), Liming Pei, PhD (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), and Katalin Susztak, MD, PhD (University of Pennsylvania), with a leadership team spanning engineering, physiology, computational biology, and clinical medicine.

The priority is to build a multi-organ, multi-scale human map to digitally organize all physiological processes. The Whole Person Physiome map will incorporate physiological processes alongside clinical measures and hospital codes, and will be AI-ready and data science compatible. The map will be complemented by computational models representing a baseline healthy person, as well as visualizations and tools for outside researchers. The vision is for clinicians and researchers to input their patient or research data and predict the cascading effects of simulated perturbations. 

“Understanding the human body as an interconnected system has always been the ultimate goal of medicine,” said Michael Snyder. “With this center, we will build a shared, evolving resource that integrates physiology, modeling, and clinical data, making it accessible to both scientists and clinicians. This is an opportunity to fundamentally change how we study health and disease.”

An organizing nexus for expert collaboration
The WPP-RCC will coordinate a multi-tier network of clinical and scientific experts to iteratively construct the Whole Person Physiome map. It will serve as the central hub for collaboration, consensus-building, and integration with other large-scale efforts in organ and molecular atlasing, modeling, and tool development.

By design, the WPP-RCC will be open and collaborative, inviting researchers across domains to contribute to the Whole Person Working Group and to apply WPP resources to their own studies. Annual data jamborees will foster community engagement, while close integration with NIH stakeholders will ensure alignment with evolving research priorities.

“The Human Reference Atlas effort brings together more than 200 experts to create a multiscale, multimodal, three-dimensional atlas of the anatomical structures and cells in the healthy human body,” said Katy Börner. “This project combines expertise across biology, medicine, engineering, and data science to map and model the function of the healthy human body and to make all data and code available to the research community.”

An accessible digital resource for broad scientific impact
The WPP-RCC will build an online portal as the entry point for the Whole Person Physiome. This resource will provide:

  • Expert-curated maps of the interconnectivity of physiological processes

  • Prototype models

  • A six-month release cycle to share updates and new tools.

  • User-friendly analytical and visualization interfaces, alongside code and notebooks for expert users.

  • Tutorials and educational materials for training the next generation of researchers.

 

“Our priority is not just to build these models, but to ensure they are maximally useful and accessible to clinicians and scientists everywhere,” said Liming Pei.

 

The WPP-RCC represents a major step toward digitizing human physiology as an evolving resource — one that will empower discovery and inspire new therapies. Learn more at https://wholeperson.stanford.edu/