The MEDITWIN consortium was announced on Monday December 11, 2023, in the presence of the French President, with the participation of representatives from the consortium comprising 7 University Hospital Institutes (IHUs), Nantes University Hospital, Inria, associated 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 cancerous tumors, 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 on the basis of virtual twins, in the fields of neurology, cardiology and oncology. The result will be seven “virtual healthcare products” marketed and deployed on a sovereign industrial cloud platform.

The MEDITWIN project leans on the expertise of world-class partners in each of the fields covered, around the 14 founding members of this consortium: Dassault Systèmes, as the consortium’s industrial leader, seven University Hospital Institutes (IHU), at the highest level of medical and scientific excellence, the Nantes University Hospital via the Thorax Institute, the start-ups inHEART, Codoc, Qairnel and Neurometers, and Inria through 11 project-teams involved in this project.

Virtual twins have become indispensable in the aeronautics and mobility industries, where virtualization has enabled considerable progress in terms of safety, quality, ecological footprint and economic competitiveness. MEDITWIN draws on the experience accumulated by the partners over many years in the field of digital twins for healthcare, such as the Living Heart initiative by Dassault Systèmes (link), the Living Brain (link), not forgetting the actions of the PEPR Santé Numérique co-directed by Inria and INSERM, to give just a few examples.

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

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

In practice, the MEDITWIN initiative will be developed over 5 years, from 2024 to 2029. The partners’ investment in this project will be financially supported by the French government as part of France 2030.