MEDITWIN brings together French science and technology excellence around virtual twins for the future of medical care

Vélizy-Villacoublay, France - January 24, 2024 - The MEDITWIN consortium was announced on December 11, 2023, in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron. More details were presented at the PariSanté Campus on December 14 in the presence of French Minister Delegate for Industry Roland Lescure. The consortium is made up of seven University Hospital Institutes (IHUs), Nantes University Hospital (CHU), Inria, startups and Dassault Systèmes. MEDITWIN will offer virtual twins for medical practice, helping to improve the quality of care for safer, more accessible healthcare for all.

The MEDITWIN project will offer personalized virtual twins of organs, metabolism and cancer, for better diagnosis and treatment. In particular, MEDITWIN will enable doctors to simulate future scenarios for a patient. 

Seven new medical practices will be developed from the virtual twins, in neurology, cardiology and oncology. This will result in seven "virtual healthcare products" that will be deployed on a sovereign industrial cloud platform.

The MEDITWIN project leverages the expertise of world-class partners in each of the fields covered, around the 14 founding members of this consortium: Dassault Systèmes, as the industrial leader of the consortium; seven University Hospital Institutes at the highest level of medical and scientific excellence; Nantes University Hospital via l’institut du thorax; startups inHEART, Codoc, Qairnel and Neurometers; and Inria through 11 project teams involved in this project.

Virtual twins have become an indispensable asset in the aeronautics and mobility industries, where virtualization has enabled considerable progress in terms of safety, quality, ecological footprint and cost-effectiveness. MEDITWIN builds on the experience accumulated by the partners over many years in the field of virtual twins for healthcare, such as the Living Heart initiative by Dassault Systèmes (link), the Living Brain (link), as well as the activities of the PEPR digital health program co-directed by Inria and INSERM, for example.

MEDITWIN will enable the industrialization, clinical validation and standardization of these innovations, so that these technologies can be deployed in a standardized way and benefit as many people as possible. The best standards of care will be incorporated into virtualized experiences made accessible worldwide, setting a new benchmark for quality in healthcare and providing a decisive learning ground for progress in medical science.

The benefits of virtual twins will be assessed for medical teams, patients, and the healthcare system, notably in terms of improving the efficiency of care, quality of multidisciplinary decision-making, and effectiveness and safety of medical practices and interventions.

In practice, the MEDITWIN initiative will be developed over five years, from 2024 to 2029. The partners' investment in this project will be financially supported by the French government as part of the “France 2030” plan.

 
Partner quotes
Bernard Charlès, Chairman of Dassault Systèmes
“Virtual twins have successfully enabled the industrial world to transform itself more sustainably. Today, this technology is opening up new possibilities for healthcare by revealing the secrets of the human body - by understanding and representing the invisible. For 40 years, Dassault Systèmes has been a pioneer in virtual twins, and we can apply our knowledge and know-how to transform medical practice. The MEDITWIN public-private alliance is a major step forward, mobilizing the best of medicine, science and technology to serve future healthcare. The virtual twin is already a reality, and MEDITWIN will help standardize and disseminate it worldwide to benefit millions of patients.”

Bruno Sportisse, CEO of Inria
“Building an active digital ecosystem can only make France a European leader in digital healthcare innovation. In line with their strategic partnership signed in 2021, Inria and Dassault Systèmes are actively collaborating in the field of virtual twins in healthcare, with an aligned vision of the challenges of sovereignty and the digital transformation of healthcare. Supported by France 2030, the MEDITWIN project, resulting from ambitious collaboration between Dassault Systèmes, Inria and IHU France, demonstrates the commitment of these players to building a French industry at the forefront of emerging healthcare issues, all for the benefit of patients.”

Fabrice André, CEO of IHU PRISM of Gustave Roussy
“The MEDITWIN consortium is in line with PRISM's vision of developing cancer avatars to model biology at the patient level and tailor personalized therapies. PRISM will also benefit from the expertise of the other IHUs, and will be working closely with them to develop interdisciplinary projects.”

Pierre JAIS, CEO of IHU LIRYC
“Combining 7 IHUs, Inria and Dassault Systèmes, MEDITWIN is a remarkable public/private collaboration. This unique project opens a new era for scaled and automated preventive medicine, so critical for patients and immensely cost effective. Finally, it offers French doctors and researchers the opportunity of relying on a global industry champion in digital health for future medical research.”

Pr. Didier Mutter, CEO, IHU Strasbourg
“Virtual twins will be essential elements in the medicine of the future, as they will enable treatments to be simulated to provide patients with the best possible results. MEDITWIN is an exceptional project in terms of its ambition and the challenges to be met. It's also a premiere for the IHU France alliance, uniting a multidisciplinary biomedical research capability that has no parallel anywhere in the world. For IHU Strasbourg, it will be a powerful catalyst for improving the minimally invasive management of metastatic colorectal cancer, in close collaboration with two of its historical founders, Inria and the University Hospitals of Strasbourg.”

Pr. Michel Paques, IHU FOReSIGHT, head of the ophthalmology 4 department and Director of the Clinical Investigation Center at the 15-20 national hospital
“The integration of the FOReSIGHT IHU into the MEDITWIN consortium will enable the large-scale development of retinal microcirculation twins, enabling personalized detection and monitoring of cerebral and cardiovascular diseases in quantitative terms. This will be the first development of a quantitative microcirculatory biomarker. The FOReSIGHT IHU has developed expertise in innovative microvascular imaging using retinal imaging with adaptive optics, a technique in which France is a leader, with the help of French high-tech companies and research institutes. This approach, unique in the world, will be strengthened with Dassault Systèmes through the development of algorithms based in particular on AI to extract morphometric information from large retinal surfaces. The integration of these measurements into biomarkers that can be used directly by practitioners represents a major challenge for the transfer from the research laboratory to the consulting room.”

Pr. Stanislas Lyonnet, CEO of Institut Imagine
“Institut Imagine is proud to have been one of the initiators of the strategic partnership between Dassault Systèmes and Alliance IHU France on virtual twins. We are delighted to put our medical and research excellence in the field of rare diseases at the service of the MEDITWIN project. The first project, developed with Dassault Systèmes and INRIA, concerns cardiology, with a peri-surgical decision support system designed to drastically reduce the mortality rate of newborns suffering from congenital heart disease (Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome) thanks to a personalized virtual twin of the cardiovascular system. Our second project, developed in partnership with Dassault Systèmes and startup CODOC, concerns pediatric neurology, with a tool for managing the Multidisciplinary Board Meeting that uses a virtual twin of patients to aid medical decision-making and management of rare epilepsies, in particular Dravet syndrome. These two projects offer significant opportunities for researchers and doctors, who will be able to visualize, test, understand, and predict before experimenting on patients.”

Pr. Alexis Brice, CEO of Paris Brain Institute, IHU ICM
“We are delighted to collaborate closely with Dassault Systèmes and Inria within the IHU Alliance. We aim to structure an ecosystem of innovation in healthcare from which the medicine of tomorrow will emerge. The digital twin embodies the ambitions of the Institute's research: to streamline the use of health data at different scales, to model and predict the evolution of diseases, to diagnose early, and to build personalized medicine on a solid and reliable foundation. Within MEDITWIN, Paris Brain Institute will contribute its expertise in detecting Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and epilepsy, and in analyzing data from patient cohorts.”

Pr. Stéphane Hatem, CEO of IHU ICAN and Director of the UMR 1166 Research Unit on Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases
“Virtual twin technology opens up possibilities for novel precision and preventive medicine for cardiometabolic diseases. Its goal is to predict the personal future risk of developing a cardiovascular disease, based on individual risk profiles, especially the genomic signature. Such an ambition requires changing the scale of today’s research that will be achieved through the MEDITWIN project led by Dassault Systèmes and with all its partners on board.”

Pr. Bertrand Cariou, Director of l’institut du thorax, CHU de Nantes
“Nantes University Hospital, via ‘l’institut du thorax’, in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes engineers, will carry out developments aimed at improving the prediction of cardiovascular accidents, which represent the leading cause of mortality in industrialized countries. To achieve this goal, the researchers will use data from the SAFIR cohort, an outcome of the CHOPIN (CHOlesterol Personalized INnovation) nationwide translational research project, on patients with familial hypercholesterolemia with or without cardiovascular disease. This pilot study in a very high-risk cardiovascular population will combine clinical, multi-omics and imaging data to create a virtual twin model, which will then be validated in a larger cardiovascular population.”

Todor Jeliaskov, CEO of inHEART
“At inHEART, we are excited to be part of MEDITWIN and on the forefront of the digital health transformation. Within MEDITWIN, inHEART will focus on the prevention of Sudden Cardiac Death, which takes more than 800,000 lives each year. We need to move our healthcare systems from reacting to acute complications to preventing complications. Digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence are accelerating this process.”

Arthur Delapalme, Co-founder and CEO of CODOC
“The MEDITWIN project has succeeded in bringing together the medical expertise of several different University Hospital Institutes. In our view, this multidisciplinary approach is a fruitful way of accelerating research and rapidly bringing the benefits of innovations to patients. As CODOC, we are very proud to build one of the seven virtual twins of this project.”

Stanley Durrleman, CEO of QAIRNEL
“At Qairnel, we're proud to be part of the MEDITWIN project. Our virtual twins simulate the evolution of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The project will enable us to put these technologies into the hands of practitioners, to propose personalized management schemes and therapeutic strategies. This will enable us to respond to one of the major public health challenges of the 21st century.”

Lionel Naccache, Co-Founder of Neurometers
“Neurometers aims to generalize the medical use of the electroencephalogram (EEG) to quantify the cerebral signatures of consciousness and cognition. Initially developed in healthy subjects and non-communicative patients, with highly original results validated in numerous scientific publications, we have more recently discovered and reported that this approach could prove highly promising in the field of neurodegenerative diseases that impair cognition, such as Alzheimer's disease. For the first time, direct measures of cognitive functioning could be integrated into routine clinical monitoring of patients, complementing neuropsychological tests and measures of cerebral atrophy. This approach could also make it possible to evaluate the efficacy of new therapies. Our participation in the MEDITWIN project is aimed at improving the quality of our algorithms by analyzing a large cohort of patient EEG recordings in an evolutionary manner.”

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About France 2030
The France 2030 investment plan:

• Reflects a double ambition: sustainably transform key sectors of our economy (energy, automotive, aeronautics or space) through technological innovation, and position France not only as a player, but also as a leader in the world of tomorrow. From basic research, to the emergence of an idea to the production of a new product or service, France 2030 supports the entire life cycle of innovation until its industrialization.
• Is unpublished by its magnitude: €54 billion will be invested to ensure that our companies, universities and research organizations are fully successful in their transitions in these strategic sectors. The challenge: to enable them to respond competitively to the ecological and attractiveness challenges of the coming world, and to bring out the future champions of our sectors of excellence. France 2030 is defined by two cross-cutting objectives consisting in dedicating 50% of its spending to the decarbonization of the economy, and 50% to emerging players, who are the bearers of innovation without spending that is unfavorable to the environment (in the sense of the Do No Significant Harm principle).
• Will be implemented collectively: designed and deployed in consultation with economic, academic, local and European stakeholders to determine their strategic orientations and flagship actions. Project leaders are invited to submit their application via open, demanding and selective procedures to benefit from the support of the State.
• Is led by the General Secretariat for Investment on behalf of the Prime Minister and implemented by the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), the French National Research Agency (ANR), Bpifrance and the Banque des Territoires.

More information on: france2030.gouv.fr | @SGPI_avenir