Virtual Twin
© SchirraGiraldi (Manuela Schirra and Fabrizio Giraldi)An avatar that digitally and faithfully reproduces the physiology of the body, from the heartbeat to the skeleton and to the DNA, to be used to test new drugs or simulate complex interventions. How? By bits.
The first applications already active are in the cardiological field: at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) pacemakers are tested before implanting them on patients. The rest will arrive shortly.
The VPH – the Virtual Physiological Human project is funded by the EU and led by Professor Peter Coveney of University College London, 16 core partners are involved.
Coveney states: "There is no doubt that the virtual twin will save lives, as it will be able to predict the outcome before it occurs." While Andrea Townsend-Nicholson, Professor of Biochime and Molecular Biology at University College, specifies: "It is revolutionary because you look at a system, the patient will be seen as a whole system".
For Coveney, the “Virtual Human” will have a major impact on medicine and could completely revolutionize the healthcare.
Mariano Vázquez, High Performance Computational Mechanics Team Leader of the BSC and Co-Founder & CTO at ELEM Biotech, defines one of its main applications today: “To date we have the possibility to test pacemakers on 1000 virtual hearts before implanting them on the real one. It is an unparalleled technological revolution that already brings concrete benefits to research and medicine."
The VPH is an ambitious project structured by very complex algorithms developed by supercomputers in Barcelona, Munich, Amsterdam and Sheffield, and as Coveney sum up: “The Virtual Human is the basis for the new medicine of the 21st century and beyond”.
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