Meet your virtual twin, they could save your life

Dassault Systèmes’ virtualisation technology is changing the face of medicine writes Rory Kelleher

When someone close to you is diagnosed with cancer it always comes as a shock, there are the fears about how progressed the cancer is, what type of cancer it is and how treatable it is - and what that means for their future health.

Virtualisation would not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the effectiveness of cancer treatments but Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twins have revolutionised the process of trialling new cancer treatments, meaning no patient gets left behind.

In standard clinical trials a percentage of those who sign up to participate in the trial receive a placebo, so that the effectiveness of the treatment can be compared in the real world with a patient who has had no treatment – this is a standard practice for clinical trials. However, with Dassault Systèmes virtual twin technology that is now changing. For certain rare but aggressive cancers, when a promising new cancer treatment goes for clinical trial all the patients can now receive the new treatment.

The results and outcomes for the group of patients who would usually receive the placebo without knowing it can now be generated virtually by mining and modelling decades of clinical trial data. This new method of using a ‘synthetic control arm’ is approved by the FDA, and means that instead of some patients not receiving the treatment and not being aware of that until the trial is complete, all the patients on the trial receive the new treatment. Not only does this mean that more patients receive breakthrough drugs, it also means more patients can have access to it earlier, while maintaining the same high clinical standards as any other drug trial.

“Through our extensive use of virtual twin technology across all areas of the Plant, Product, Process and Patient, we can greatly reduce the cost and time associated with drug development and patient outcomes. We are also able to ensure greater quality and faster regulatory approval through leveraging these virtual models. In the Medical Device arena this also helps health care professionals to play out ‘what if’ scenarios thus helping them plan the best methods of treatment for patients and design appropriate medical devices that suit individuals need – such is the power of this technology,” said Kevin O’Leary, VP of R&D, Quality & Compliance, Dassault Systèmes.

Through our extensive use of virtual twin technology across all areas of the Plant, Product, Process and Patient, we can greatly reduce the cost and time associated with drug development and patient outcomes. We are also able to ensure greater quality and faster regulatory approval through leveraging these virtual models.

The seeds of the application of this breakthrough technology in healthcare came from Dr Steve Levine, the lead for Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart project, who had personal reasons to want to create a digital twin of the heart. His daughter was born with congenital heart disease, and when she was in her late 20s and at high risk of heart failure, he decided to recreate her heart in virtual reality.

“I watched, as most parents would, kind of helplessly, some of the best doctors really guessing what might work. It dawned on me that they really did not understand the function - and did not have tools to address things they had never seen before. If we can give an engineer a fully functioning jet to try out, why can’t we give a doctor a fully functioning heart?” he told CES 2023.

“The way an engineer can predict how a car might crash, fix the weaknesses before it actually gets into production, we can now start to do that in health care.”

Dassault Systèmes’s virtualisation and twinning technology was originally focused on the automotive and aerospace industry. The realisation of the wide applications in healthcare, and multiple other industries, led the company to put a clear focus on how it could take medical treatments to the next level of effectiveness by the first modelling the effects on a digital twin before applying the treatment in the real world.

At Dassault Systèmes Cork, office engineers are working on all aspects of the end to end regulatory licensing and continuous quality improvement for these healthcare scenarios. The team are using machine learning alongside the virtual twins to help their clients to prevent rather than just correct production or patient delivery issues. The resulting data can be used to generate the appropriate regulatory approval content for agencies around the world.

The virtual twin approach helped Dr Levine to analyse and simulate how treatment will effect on a virtual person before it is applied on a live patient. It enables surgeons to potentially perform a surgery before ever entering the operating room so that they can optimise their approach and know before they go into to operate what the best surgical approach is.

Researchers can use the “living heart” to test potential treatments virtually before they are actually carried out on patients. This technology helps map out the patient heart conditions and test devices that may help children with difficult-to-treat heart conditions. Major hospitals’ including London’s

Great Ormond Street in the UK and Boston Children Hospital in the US are currently using this technology.

The Living Heart Project brings together leading cardiovascular researchers, educators, medical device developers, regulatory agencies, and practising cardiologists to drive a shared mission to develop and validate highly accurate personalised digital human heart models.

Dassault Systèmes is planning to expand the scope of virtual twin applications to push out the frontier on modelling the effectiveness of medical treatments and the team at its Cork office will play a key role in making that vision become a reality.