If your doctor could test every possible variation of a procedure on a perfect double of you before he picks up a scalpel, or customize a complex cocktail of cancer drugs to your specific body chemistry, you would want that, right?
Of course you would, and it is a lot closer thanks to a global initiative to develop virtual human twins, capable of enabling these precision medical experiences. In fact, they are already being used to test dozens of new treatments with thousands of patients already receiving the benefits from virtual twins of their organs, laying the foundation for an entire virtual human twin.
This may be a surprise, but progress towards the virtual human twin has been underway for more than a decade. Researchers, doctors, surgeons and even government agencies have been collaborating on real-to-life computer models of hearts, lungs, brains, liver, eyes, knees and hips, even your skin. The most advanced of these, developed by a global consortium as the Living Heart Project (LHP), celebrated its 10thanniversary last fall at the Virtual Human Twin Experience Symposium attended – in person and virtually – by more than 1,000 researchers from 73 countries.
Why all the excitement? The LHP’s model of the human heart is an open, clinically focused and peer-reviewed virtual twin that is administered, enriched and applied to actual patient cases by hundreds of cardiovascular experts worldwide. It began over a decade ago with the idea that working together, experts from different disciplines might be able to create a true virtual human heart twin. They did and it has since been used to recreate and virtually treat thousands of patients. These learnings are then fed back into the Living Heart Project community, continuously improving and enriching the accuracy and scope and trust of the virtual twin. And that community includes the US FDA.
No longer is there a question if we can create these twins, it is now a question of what to create and how to coordinate it. The breakthroughs from the LHP have not just proven it possible to create human twins, but have advanced the technology to the point where researchers feel ready to take on an even more audacious project: modeling the entire human body. A crowd-sourced effort towards a complete Human Living Twin that could do what the Living Heart can do, but on a scale infinitely more complex and profound.
“Our original mission was to create a virtual twin of a single organ,” said Steve Levine, founder of the Living Heart Project and Sr. Director of Virtual Human Modeling at Dassault Systèmes, who develop the software behind the LHP and other medical virtual twins. “Our new mission is to create a virtual twin of the entire human body.”
Breaking medical specialty silos
Modeling not only the body’s organs, but also the chemical, biological and electrical interactions among all its systems will allow innovations in treatments for more complex conditions such as Alzheimer’s or cancer, maybe even the processes behind aging. And because these twins exist in the virtual world, they can be safely customized to reflect any patient’s unique physiology and body chemistry, predicting real-world outcomes to perfect treatments just for them before they receive them.
As these virtual twins evolve, proponents believe that the technology will help break down the silos between medical specialties, enabling care teams to see, understand and treat the whole patient. How? By populating the patient’s virtual twins with existing knowledge – not just data – from scans, x-rays, blood tests and other medical records accumulated on a patient and others like them over years. This information can be presented such that any medical professional regardless of specialty can interpret the full story, not just the piece within their expertise.
“The Living Heart Project proved that it’s possible for hundreds of medical researchers and doctors to work together on a collaborative platform, and by doing so create a virtual twin so accurate that it can improve not just the length but also the quality of our lives,” Levine said.
“Inspired by this success, teams have made many down payments on the virtual human twin vision with programs to develop Living Brains, Lungs, Livers, Kidneys, Knees, Shoulders and even Skin, from the organ down to individual cells. Some more advanced than others, but the template is proven, the research communities have formed and the ecosystems are global. The momentum is now unstoppable”, he added,
Virtual twins save two generations
Levine began using Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin software, known as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, to a craft a medically accurate computer model of the human heart fueled by a very personal goal: could we understand the unusual structure of his daughter’s heart in hopes of improving her treatments. Little did he know then that a decade later his work – expanded and enriched by hundreds of medical experts worldwide – would have helped to save not only his daughter’s life but, in a stunning twist last year, his own.
Levine’s daughter Jesse was born with a “backwards” heart, where the key pumping chambers, the ventricles were reversed. A pacemaker kept her alive, but her heart’s unusual structure would lead to many life threatening complications, and her doctors not only had to adapt drugs and devices like the pacemaker that were meant for adults for children, they had to guess how they might work for her unique case, leading to frequent, disruptive surgeries.
With the creation of the virtual twin, Levine was able to understand her heart, pinpoint ways to improve both lifestyle and treatments, eliminating many of the anticipated surgeries and giving his daughter a more normal life. Instead of being afraid of doctors, as she once was, Jesse Levine became a doctor: an MD/PhD and chief resident in pediatric neurology at Baylor College of Medicine, a choice that proved life-changing for her father in 2024.
Years of work on the Living Heart Project prompted Levine to make a habit of monitoring his heart health. In 2024, however, he noticed an unusual pattern: His resting heart rate was spiking, even when there appeared to be no obvious cause. He also experienced ear and eye infections, eye strain and instances of double vision, all attributed by his doctors to normal aging, travel and job related stress.
Jesse suggested that her father have an MRI. The scan revealed a massive tumor the size of a golf ball behind his eyes, slowly growing for decades. The tumor had surrounded his pituitary gland, causing it to pump out too much Human Growth Hormone (HGH), as well as engulf both optic nerves and the arteries feeding blood to his brain. The tumor had penetrated deeply into his brain, causing cerebral spinal fluid to leak, which led to the chronic infections that triggered its discovery. In hindsight, Levine noted that the growth hormone had other telltale signs; his feet had grown, his jaw became mis-aligned, his tongue swelled he had even grown an inch taller. His resting heartrate observation, likely due to vascular thickening throughout his body.
As with his daughter before him, surgeons created his virtual twin and were able to design a complex, life-saving medical procedure that could be performed without a single incision. In this case, his twin was used in the operating room to guide the noninvasive procedure, removing the tumor and repairing its damage while avoiding any life-threatening complications that could result from even a minor error. While the Levines’ situations are unique, they stand as powerful examples of potential of virtual human twins in medicine.
“This is a perfect example of why we need a virtual human twin,” Levine said, on stage at 10th Virtual Human Twin Experience Symposium just a few months after his surgery. “While I had something wrong in my brain, it was affecting every system in my body. So, while we need to focus on the organs – the Living Eye project was very important to me in this surgery, for example – the full system ultimately is going to control the process.”
Virtual human twins take root in France
As the initiative enters its second decade, the teams are focused on transforming these rare use-cases into everyday practice. Inspired by this goal, 14 French healthcare organizations, institutions and companies have formed MEDITWIN, a targeted consortium dedicated to developing and demonstrating the power of virtual twins to research, diagnose and treat specific diseases that affect the entire body. The project will begin with cancers, cardiovascular disorders and neurological disorders, then expand to other conditions and specialties.
MEDITWIN builds on the legacy and technology foundations from Living Heart and other “living” virtual twin projects. First pioneered by Dassault Systèmes, these collaborative efforts leverage the full power of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, providing a secure environment to share data and knowledge, apply a range of powerful scientific tools and deliver the results to medical professionals wherever they or the patient are located.
“The term ‘living’ is very important because this isn’t just a static model,” said Nicolas Pecuchet, a physician and director of Corporate Research for Life Sciences and Healthcare at Dassault Systèmes. “To create a heartbeat [in the virtual twin] we need to have contraction and relaxation of the muscles, take account of the flux of ions across membranes, the cycle of cells, the replication and repair of DNA, and thousands of other factors.
“And now we’re not talking about just one organ, but about connecting human systems in a comprehensive way to understand the important elements that contribute to a disease and its treatment. It’s a coordination of many research efforts – including diagnostics and interventions with new types of devices, drugs and even virtual therapies. And of course taking place in different settings of care. So we want to provide this integrated view of a patient and all of the interactions around them.”
This cannot be done in isolation. The current standard of care is far from integrated, so involvement of clinical institutions is critical. While they have digitized the data, most patient information lives in static records – charts, scans, radiographs – ordered and held by different specialists, making consolidated analysis difficult. “Today, we have siloed practitioners who are very specialized in their fields, but it is difficult for them to look at the patient holistically,” Dr. Pecuchet said. “Maybe we get new imaging and we add that to the previous record, but how do we combine them together?” Pecuchet said. “How do we integrate new knowledge from the new information?”
Virtual human twin experiences, which have powerful artificial intelligence (AI) built into them, have the potential to capture, track, analyze and find meaning across many different data formats and to manage interactions among many different specialists. This consolidated view will help doctors recognize situations like Levine’s – where a brain tumor manifested as heart symptoms – to detect it early and optimize treatment.
Like the Living Heart Project, this new generation of virtual human twins will present findings to physicians as actionable intelligence. Physicians and technicians also can query the data to quickly gain insights, not only specific to their specialty but to all of those that are relevant, and importantly have access to the underlying data and methodologies applied.
Turing patient data and physician knowledge into medical solutions
Across France, the Institute Universities Hospitals (IHU) are bringing their specialized expertise to help build virtual human twins. Through the MEDITWIN consortium, IHU facilities will contribute real-world patient data and clinical knowledge to develop immersive virtual human twin experiences in three specialties: cardiovascular, cancer and neurological disorders. Within these specialties, seven high-impact diseases have been selected as targets including pediatric heart surgery planning, post-heart attack risk prevention and cardiometabolic disease prevention in the cardiovascular discipline. For cancer, the teams have chosen virtual twin guided metastatic cancer intervention and a systems biology approach to precision treatment. The neurological targets are early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and optimizing the lifelong management of epilepsy.
“The hospitals brought real medical needs, use cases, that the consortium will solve by developing virtual human technologies and experiences that answer those needs,” Pecuchet said. Once validated, the virtual twins will be distributed globally by Dassault Systèmes and the four French startups in the project.
“The reality is that a patient who seems to have one disease can be suffering from several diseases that are closely intertwined,” said Cecile Bonnard, senior manager of Cardiology Twin Technology for Dassault Systèmes. Take a patient who has a gut cancer, for example, he may have an infection as well. You treat the infection with antibiotics which in turn affects the gut microbiota, lowering the efficacy of the cancer treatment. This is why we need a system-of-systems approach, starting with multi-modal data from real patients, including images, signaling such as EEGs, and their biology.”
Equally important and a lesson learned in the LHP is the need for physician expertise, practical knowledge of the rationale behind clinical decisions. “And so we will gather physician knowledge on why we collect this data specifically in this situation. We want to be able to integrate that knowledge in the Human Virtual Twin, so that is an important component of the MEDITWIN consortium”, Bonnard added.
The IHU’s contributions are just the beginning. “We are starting with 14 partners, but we intend to invite an open ecosystem to help build it out,” Pecuchet said. “We chose a limited number of specialties for focus, to act as proof points we can use to catalyze a transformation of the field.”
Ultimately, he said, the goal is to move beyond fragmented, specialized medical silos into an integrated, collaborative network that sees, understands and treats the entire patient, delivering not only longer lives but healthier ones, too.
This blog is part of a series on Dassault Systèmes’ 10th International Virtual Twin Human Experience Symposium.
Watch the symposium, learn more about out Virtual Human Twin Initiatives, and keep an eye out for the next blog in this series.
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