Digital twins — virtual replicas of real-world things — have made their way into manufacturing, industry, as well as aerospace. Major cities, ports, and power stations have already been modelled as complex digital twins. Now, the concept could be coming to life beyond the scope of science fiction with the creation of virtual representation of people.
Peter Coveney, a professor of chemistry and computer science at University College London, and Roger Highfield, Science Director at London’s Science Museum recently presented their book ‘Virtual You’. The book focuses on the realistic digital simulations of people. At the book’s launch, leading healthcare digital twin experts from University of Oxford, UCL, and Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) discussed further the opportunities and challenges of digital twin models of the human body, and its implications for medicine.
The BSC has already created Alya Red, a virtual heart model comprising of around 100 million cells, which beats within the MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. Working with the medical technology company Medtronic, the Alya Red simulations have enabled the positioning of a pacemaker, fine-tuning its electrical stimulus, and modelling its effects, all without touching a real patient.
Yoon-sun, a 26-year-old Korean woman, was an even more impressive example. Her entire 95,000km-long network of vessels has been mapped virtually through an international collaboration using several supercomputers. This enabled the researchers to study blood pressure, the movement of clots, and assess how inputs can impact the entire vascular system.
The models are being used for in silico trials. The simulations allow companies to test their drugs or diseases in virtual patients before conducting them on real subjects, reducing costs and ethical issues associated with animal testing. The simulations also help predict blood pressure levels and the risk of abnormal heart rhythms with greater accuracy than animal testing. The AI capability of these digital twins could also potentially help in fighting the next public health emergency such as COVID-19, by simulating treatments, predicting how the virus might spread, and more.
The authors believe that the advances so far have provided the groundwork to scale up to digital twins of the entire human body. These simulations would not only mirror the appearance of a person but also mimic their behaviour.
This would involve collecting and analysing vast amounts of personal data, such as scans of the body, organs, genomic data, biochemical analysis, and wearable devices. The simulations will enable physicians to better understand how their treatments and drugs will work on their patient, and even provide insights into lifestyle and diet choices to improve health.
However, there are still massive technical hurdles to be overcome for creating virtual patients, such as access to supercomputers like Frontier, and stitching together the various codes–each part of the digital human is technically a separate simulation. Additionally, ethical considerations will also have to be taken into account in order to contain the power of these simulations.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre has been the driving force in the development of digital twins, powered by their supercomputers. Drawing from its 20 years of experience in developing and managing HPC infrastructures, the BSC, in collaboration with academic and industrial partners, has become a global leader in simulating medical applications and is considered one of the largest and most successful research organizations worldwide.
The CEO of French clinical trial simulation platform Novadiscovery, François-Henri Boissel is one of the foremost experts on this topic. He is convinced that complete and successful virtual patients are closer than expected and could be available for practical medical uses within the next five years.
