The modern practice of scientific medicine depends on the existence of the written and printed information to store medical information. New digital tools can't just record clinical data, they can also generate medical intelligence by analyzing historical data. This leap of industry into "digital medicine" is potentially precise, effective, widely distributed & available to more people than the current medical practice. Critical steps in the creation of Digital Medicine are analysis of the impact of new technologies & coordinated efforts to direct technological development towards creating a new paradigm of medical care. So Digital Technology can be used in two areas in medicine, to aid research and for medical care.
3D modelling is used to produce precise representations of anatomies in patients. This enables medical teams to plan and visualize complex surgeries & to produce life-saving implants and prostheses cuastomized for individual patients. It’s a remarkable evolution that is having a tremendous impact on patient’s lives.However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The true revolution in medicine and medical care in the 21st century will not come from such physical models, but from virtual ones. Looking into the future, these virtual models will be able to simulate the true physiology and Pathophysiology of human beings in coming years, changing forever the way we research, diagnose and treat injuries and disease.
While your virtual twin may seem like a distant dream, progress in bringing this dream to life is actually already well underway in the nascent field of Bio-intelligence. Bio-Intelligence uses computer technologies to model, simulate, visualize and experience biological medical processes in a virtual environment. While drug makers have for some time modeled and screened virtual proteins and compounds against medical databases, drug development and production remain largely rooted in the real world, and collaboration between disciplines and organizations has been limited.
Every day, drug makers work to produce real drugs that they test on real animals, and then on real patients in real clinical trials. And the time and money they expend is staggering. According to studies companies can expect to spend $3 billion over a period of ten years to bring a single new drug to market
Add to this challenge the dynamism and complexity of living systems, and it becomes clear that a collaborative approach to research and development, along with the use of virtual modelling and simulation, could bring enormous benefits to life science and healthcare industries. Collaboration between scientific disciplines and between pharmaceutical companies, research labs, health service providers and computer companies would allow sharing of knowledge and experience to foster insight and innovation.
And, the collaborative use of computer models and simulation would enable researchers to better understand complex systems and more accurately predict the biological effects of various medicines and treatments, enabling drug makers in turn to fine tune real-world assays and eliminate ineffective treatments from trials before the drugs are even produced.
The changing landscape of research today is forcing the bioinformatics community to seek a new level of data sharing and collaboration only made possible with new platforms.Such approaches could also open the door to truly personalized healthcare medicine as collaboratively produced models and simulations are combined with real world data from individual patients. These changes could produce significant innovation and gains in efficiency, effectiveness and safety, bringing better heath treatment outcomes to everyone.
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