Digital Twin
The DigiTwins Concept for Personalized Healthcare
Healthcare systems are facing growing socio-economical and medical challenges, in part due to our increasing longevity associated with a higher burden of chronic and degenerative diseases as well as cancer.
In the precision medicine era, a number of strategic approaches for improving healthcare and reducing this burden are being undertaken. Developing new drugs and identifying treatment schemes that better match the needs of individual patients represent core objectives in precision medicine initiatives. Further emphasis is devoted on personalizing prevention strategies which could help citizens to stay healthy, active and productive.
In this dynamic field, high-throughput data analysis solutions harnessing for instance artificial intelligence and mechanistic modelling approaches are actively developed to address the massive challenges posed by the digital healthcare revolution. Alacris Theranostics has been an important player in this area pushing the Digital twin concept forward in a proposal selected in the first phase of the EU Flagship projects (DigiTwins 2019). The DigiTwins vision is to foster truly individualized healthcare and disease prevention systems, based on multi-level characterization of the patients including clinical, molecular, and imaging information. This paradigm shift is exploiting the most advanced omics and imaging data, sensor-based devices, computing and communication technologies to enable personalized and preventive medicine, which will eventually become part of routine healthcare.
ModCell™ empowers drug response prediction
The ‘Digital Twin’ concept envisions to enable treatment strategies to be first optimized digitally on the computer, based on the patient’s clinical and molecular data. In this approach, the patient can be digitally treated with potential drugs to predict response and potential side effects for maximizing the chances of identifying the best matched therapy.
As part of this concept, the ModCell™ system developed at Alacris Theranostics is designed to model the tumor response to specific therapies or therapy combinations based on individual deep omics data. Building a virtual twin of each tumor, ModCell™ represents a unique opportunity to virtualise and accelerate drug discovery and development processes.
ModCell™ to aid in the virtualisation of drug development
We offer our unique ModCell™ mechanistic tumor modelling to assist research projects and clinical trials in the oncology field.
While the development of a new drug might typically take a decade, costs up to billions and entails a significant risk of failure, virtualisation of clinical trials provides an attractive cost-effective option to rationalize and accelerate the overall process.
Ranging from in-silico clinical trials in the early phase of pre-clinical drug development, to the identification of best responders and partial virtualisation of ongoing clinical trials to select the most informative biomarkers, ModCell™ is a flexible innovative tool which can be adapted to the needs of individual projects.