Pillar 2
Digital aging, gerosciene and latent COVID-19 effects
Need
The UArizona Center for Adaptive Pandemic Solutions and Dassault Systèmes have jointly established the first virtual national laboratory, providing a resilient digital medical research framework able to function under even the most severe of infectious disease threats.
Proposed Solution
Unlike any other physical laboratory, iHEAL links worldwide expertise to create and maintain realistically functional digital models of human organs and body systems under different conditions. These virtual testing subjects are available to research institutions for design and screening of new therapies and performing simulated aging studies to manage risk of long-term health effects. The result is a versatile platform, hosted in the cloud for ethically evaluating whether insults like SARS-CoV2 infection have the potential for causing multiple organ harm in the medium and long-term and provide a needed foundation to modernize our response system for the future.
Statement of Work
Initially focusing on the human physiological response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and systematically addressing unsolved medical challenges, we aim to displace animal models as the gold standard for the majority of medical research. We imagine the same platform could be utilized by private industry to address the massive costs of all new treatments, and by individualizing these human twins, pave the pathway for truly personalized medicine. Through its focus on developing cohorts of hyper-connected human models, iHEAL transcends the interests of any organization, state or country and will deliver fundamental knowledge to benefit all humankind.
