Medical scientists will reduce time, costs and risk of in vivo experiments by exploiting Paeon software for in silico clinical trials
Performing clinical trials today is a long, risky and very expensive process, as they require experimenting in vivo on animals and real patients.
Paeon provides medical scientists with the In Silico Clinical Trials Service (ISCTS), a suite of software services enabling them to perform clinical trials of new experimental treatments completely in silico, that is by means of computer simulations on a population of Virtual Patients.
ISCTS is a suite of software services supporting medical scientists in carrying out clinical trials for new treatments completely in silico, that is by means of computer simulations over a population of virtual patients.
In silico clinical trials allow medical scientists to reduce and postpone invasive, risky, costly and time-consuming in vivo experiments on animals and humans to much later stages of the process, when a deeper knowledge of the effectiveness and side-effects of the new treatment has been acquired via simulations.
In silico clinical trials are a disruptive key innovation and a highly supported research field in medicine, with a strong potential for improvement of clinical and therapeutical approaches as well as cost reduction in the development of new treatments.
By putting together a VPH model (and its associated population of Virtual Patients) and the model of a new treatment (Virtual Doctor), Paeon ISCTS allows medical scientists to evaluate how the treatment performs on the input population of Virtual Patients and to search for treatment variations optimised for a particular class of Virtual Patients.
ISCTS can be used to verify how a given treatment protocol (modelled as a Virtual Doctor) performs on a population of Virtual Patients.
ISCTS simulates the correct administration of the treatment protocol to all virtual patients and computes suitable statistics.
Actual fertility treatments currently in use at the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology of University Hospital Zurich have been successfully defined as Virtual Doctors and verified through ISCTS on the entire population of virtual patients associated to the Paeon VPH Model.
ISCTS can also be used to optimise the performance of a given treatment (modelled as a Virtual Doctor) on a certain class of Virtual Patients. To this end, ISCTS searches for variations of the input treatment model which maximise performance on a given set of Key Performance Indicators.
Variations with respect to the input treatment may differ in terms of, for example, the timings and administered doses in the various circumstances and/or for the patient classification criteria. Users can easily annotate the Virtual Doctor modelling the reference treatment to define which variations ISCTS will consider.
Like all software services developed within Paeon, ISCTS is not restricted to fertility treatments, as it is ready to be used with other VPH models and other treatment protocol models.
