The Integrative Biology project is building a Grid infrastructure which will enable biomedical scientists to develop accurate multi-scale computational models of the heart and of cancer tumours. This infrastructure will remove many of the constraints limiting research progress today by providing access to leading-edge supercomputing and data management resources and by improving facilities to support collaboration between scientists distributed around the world. This paper describes how the project is addressing some specific technical challenges in developing Such a collaborative research environment. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.