What if one day we had a twin, virtualwhich helps us to treat ourselves better and prevent diseases? A decidedly cutting-edge frontier that the company is working onUniversity of Pisaas the only Italian partner of a European project coordinated by the University of Ghent, which could radically revolutionize the therapies of the future. The project is called Vital and promises to bring about a turning point which, without too much ado, we could define as epochal in the management of therapies for diseases that are complicated to treat today.
Vital, the project that also speaks Italian
“Vital – Virtual Twins as Tools for Personalized Clinical Care”, this is the detailed name of the program, aims to create over the next five years a multi-organ platform capable of creating, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, a “virtual human twin” for patients suffering from serious cardiovascular disorders.
Vital’s virtual human twins are customized multiscale computational models which have the potential to predict the progression of a disease and the outcomes of a given treatment, over a period ranging from months to years. This technology offers the possibility of providing increasingly optimized strategies for each individual patientbut also increasingly economically advantageous, exceeding the current standards of clinical care and reducing the costs of therapies that are unthinkable today.
Basically it’s about “copies” to improve current treatments and make them increasingly personalized, tailored to the individual patient, taking into account above all those elements that today escape medical evaluation, to try to have specific long-term responses, different by sex, age and other parameters, to surgical or medical treatments on the cardiovascular system and other organs.
Because cardiovascular problems are difficult to treat today
Complex chronic cardiovascular disorders, such asheart failure or thehypertensionaffect billions of people around the world, severely compromising the quality of life and often leading to serious illness or premature death.
These disorders, experts explain, are difficult to treat due to the complex interaction between the function of the heart, lungs and blood vessels, their role in supplying blood to key organs, such as the brain and kidneys, and the variable influence of hormonal and other environmental, genetic, psychosocial factors. Essentially, a therapy that works for one patient may be ineffective and even harmful for another.
How “virtual twins” work
The Vital project, funded by the European Union, will develop the most correct technology for the next five years to build a “virtual twin” of a person’s heart and other important organs, using information collected from clinical tests or thanks to special sensors wearables, such as smart watches, to help doctors choose the best treatments for each person.
These virtual human twins will, for the first time, allow healthcare professionals to predict response to treatment in the short and medium term, up to 6 months later the start of treatment. Vital will therefore be able to provide doctors with essential tools for the early evaluation of the impact of treatment on the development of a given disease, identifying who could benefit from risky or expensive therapies, anticipating potential adverse reactions, improving the overall health outcomes of the treatment and also reducing the costs.
In parallel, it will study how patients, doctors and healthcare professionals interact with these new digital tools, also considering the ethical, social and psychosocial implications of these new technologies.
Wearable tech at the service of medicine
Vital will provide a complete multi-organ modeling platform, capable of representing individual patient data acquired both in the clinic and thanks to wearable technologies, i.e. all those wearable technology tools that are already reshaping medicine. So as to avoid needlessly subjecting people to treatments from which they would not benefit.
In practice, thanks to special intuitive interfaces, created in collaboration with doctors, the platform will create a virtual human twin to find the best pharmacological or surgical therapy for complex and multifactorial cardiovascular disorders that have a systemic impact and a high risk of comorbidity, including the others, of the kidney and brain, such as systemic hypertension and heart failure.
By the end of the project, the platform will have been validated and tested on more than 200 patients in 5 clinical trials in France and the UK.
The role of the University of Pisa
As regards the Italian role, the working group ofUniversity of Pisacoordinated by Prof. Martina Smorti of the Department of Surgical, Medical, Molecular Pathology and Critical Area of the Tuscan university, will investigate the possible psychological, social and relational impacts related to the use of this type of technology in the medical field.
“Despite the important involvement of medical, IT and engineering skills necessary for the development and implementation of the Virtual human twin – explains Professor Smorti – the project pays particular attention to the psychological, social and relational impacts of use of this type of technology at a clinical level. This is the specific objective of the working group of the University of Pisa which, thanks to psychological and sociological expertise, will investigate the factors that favor or hinder the acceptance of the virtual human twin by doctors, patients and caregivers”.
A more lateral point of view, but equally crucial, to understand how much and how the virtual human twin is accepted and welcomed by patients, how much these new strategies can improve the level of trust in doctors and in the healthcare system in general, but also stress of patients and families and the impact on healthcare professionals in using AI as a treatment tool. “The studies conducted – concludes Smorti – demonstrate that the use of Artificial Intelligence at the level of clinical practice affects all the actors and institutions involved, modifying the relationships in the field and the systems of preferences, perceptions, expectations”.
