Each segment of the economy is being transformed by digital and virtual technologies, and healthcare is no exception. Wearables collect abundant amounts of personalized health data. Medical students train for surgery in virtual reality. And emerging telemedicine solutions, used to diagnose, pre-screen or counsel patients remotely, demonstrated their value as the COVID-19 outbreak reached pandemic proportions.
These moves are the first small steps toward what society ultimately wants from medicine: preemptive healthcare that keeps us well; patient data that follows us throughout the healthcare system with full privacy protection; and personalized treatments that, though customized, are affordable.
Transforming the healthcare industry will be a challenge, but inaction is not an option. Globally, governments and providers are struggling to keep pace with soaring healthcare costs, growing patient populations and an aging society. To remake the entire system, we need better and faster ways of discovering and developing treatments, serving patients and customizing care.
For nearly four decades, Dassault Systèmes has applied digitalization to the challenges of designing, building and maintaining the world’s most complex products, so we know that disjointed, patched-together systems can’t provide the rich, full-context view vital to understanding the world’s most complex system: the human body. More than any manufactured product, each instance of the human body is unique in its chemistry, biology and physiology. As such, personalized healthcare is not a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have.
To master the art of personalized healthcare affordably, we need a way to “connect the dots” so that all actors can understand and treat the complete and unique patient. We believe 3D virtual universes—sophisticated, scientifically accurate computer simulations that can be customized to understand the full complexity and richness of each individual—can make this a reality.
The benefit to the life sciences industry is the platform effect, from drug research to commercialization, resulting in smarter treatments for healthier people.
Claire Biot
Only the Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform can create these virtual worlds at a wide range of scales, from a single molecule to a complete organ or an entire person, allowing us to understand the whole patient, experiment without risk, and find solutions at speeds never before possible. Now, with our recent acquisition of MEDIDATA, we can go even further, powering these simulations with anonymized but real patient data. Armed with these simulations, researchers can test more potential drugs, faster and less expensively, to find more cures and more applications for existing treatments. They can quickly and precisely customize medical devices to the specific physiologies of individual patients, train the next generation of doctors and technicians, and plan, analyze and simulate difficult surgeries, ensuring that the chosen approach will succeed.
Through an alliance with the US Food & Drug Administration, these simulations are being tested not just to validate physical tests in humans and animals, but to replace them. Best of all, once validated, these models can be customized to each patient’s physiology, enabling physicians to test and validate treatments before administering them and ensuring better outcomes at lower cost.
For decades, our focus at Dassault Systèmes has been on creating safe, sustainable products to serve humanity. Now we are expanding that scope to tackle the ultimate challenge: ensuring healthy humans and a healthier world where each of us can thrive.
