The virtual human concept is a compelling one, offering an in-silico environment — now known as a digital twin — within which truly personalized medicine can be implemented, taking into account the specific features of every one of us as an individual, from our personal genome to the anatomy of our connected organ systems, and beyond into human populations and clinical trials.

In this talk, Peter Coveney, adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine, will share insights on this technology from his latest book Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life (Princeton University Press). He will exchange recent breakthroughs in HPC and make comparison with other ambitious digital twin projects underway today and outline several biomedical issues which are being addressed today, based on various components of the future virtual human. These examples illustrate how future patient-specific medical treatments will draw increasingly on the massive power of modern IT systems, including big data, artificial intelligence and supercomputing.