WELCOME TO THE VIRTUAL HUMANS FACTORY

Medical trials are risky business. Human subjects eager to help researchers find cures or treatments for life-threatening ailments put their trust in medical professionals. But what if these trials could be conducted without human testers?

- S.C. STUART

Biotech company ELEM is doing just that. It built virtual humans—“not made of flesh and bones, but bits and bytes”—powered by supercomputers, which model disease states and, by extension, are “treated” by novel breakthroughs. More recently, its Virtual Heart project has been looking at how certain COVID-19 treatments affect cardiac health.

Is this the future of medicine? And if so, when do we get our own bioidentical virtual human twin who can test personalized cures before we have to pop a pill or take a shot? We spoke with Barcelona-based Christopher Morton, ELEM’s CEO, to find out more.

PCMag: As we’re still under the occupation of COVID-19, it must be dangerous to conduct large-scale human-based medical trials. So I imagine ELEM’s computational avatars, which test medical breakthroughs on disease states, are more necessary than ever?

Christopher Morton: Yes, that’s right. We are constantly in contact with doctors, businesses, and regulators: recruiting candidates and getting them into the clinics to take part in clinical trials was always an issue and, yes, COVID has made it worse. There is only so much risk people are willing to take, I guess. Another associated problem with clinical trials is the selection of candidates and the retention.

Because you have to be brave to submit yourself to a beta, especially when it comes to your health?

Yes, that and also selection is tough because of exclusion criteria. If people have too many comorbidities, it is harder to understand the true impact of a new treatment. And records show that the dropout rate can be as high as 30%.

But virtual humans are ready and willing to step in.