I actually made a mistake in the last post, saying that that lecture – at Öredev, Malmö, Sweden – was the third and last invited lecture that week. There was actually a fourth one upcoming: in China. This time it was at an international workshop on Digital therapeutics, i.e. eHealth and apps. It was largely focused on existing technologies, i.e. not only scientists were there, but also a lot of companies with products already on the markt, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, from the US. My lecture was given online, but a partner of mine went over there in person, to also have physical meetings, and to also help set up meetings in the New York/Boston area, to which I am travelling in the end of the month.
So – four invited presentations in one week, in four different cities, across two continents. I think that is actually a personal record 🙂
Today is the third and last public invited lecture this week. This time it is down in Hyllie, which is very close to the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, i.e. right on the border between the Sweden and Denmark. This lecture is again on our digital twins, and this time it is in a software and AI conference: Øredev 2024. This is a “normal” conference, which is not targeting scientists, but the general public, i.e. companies and normal citizen who are interested in software development and AI innovations, etc. This is fitting, because our research is turning increasingly more towards eHealth and app development, and even towards commercial app development via our spin-off companies. For this reason, we are also nowadays actively recruiting software and UX developers, and quite generally moving into a more public phase, targeting companies and the general public as potential customers and business partners, etc.
Picture by Roland Betnér. Program and more info for the event is available here: https://oredev.org/
There is a new chance to hear about our digital twins. This time it is in connection to the project MeDigiT, on Medical Digital Twins, which involves us, the groups of Tino Ebbers and Jonas Lanz, as well as e.g. our spin-off company SUND sound medical decisions, the company AMRA medical, etc. We speak today at the Innovation week, at 11.10-11.50 in the hospital building of Linköping University hospital. Link to more info about the entire Innovation day today. Welcome! 🙂
Today I, Gunnar Cedersund, am giving a lecture on digital twins in the beautiful city of Malå, up in the North of Sweden. The lecture is part of a week they have on the potential of AI in our evolving societies. Today’s event starts with a lecture on AI, then I talk about our digital twins, and finally there will be a panel debate, where also some politicians participate. Here is a link to the event, which I think is only attendable in person, even though my lecture and participation will be done via teams.
Two days after STRATIF-AI was featured at the BME@LIU-day in Linköping, Sweden, it is featured again in the ISMH conference in Technirghiol, Rumania. In Linköping, we had a shared booth with SUND (the spin-off company that converts the digital twins to eHealth products), and produced a roll-up and a poster. This roll-up has now been transported to Rumania, together with Gunnar Cedersund, to be displayed at a 2h session at the ISMH conference. This happens today May 23, at 17-19, CET, and can be viewed online.
ISMH stands for the International Society of Medical Hydrology and Climatology. In other words, the conference deals with water-based treatments, such as spas (German: kurort), mineral waters, mud baths, as well as temperature-based treatments, such as saunas, ice-baths, etc. These are old traditional treatments, that dates back to ancient Greek, at the least, but there is also a growing scientific interest, with 10 times more papers published per year today, compared to 20 years ago. Still, the ISMH is old, by scientific standards, and the conference celebrated its 125th birthday yesterday. In the picture below, you see Prof, MD Gelu Onose, one of our main collaborators in STRATIF-AI, and also one of the the main organizer of the event, who cut the first piece of the cake, during yesterday’s celebration.
While the official motto of the conference is “Evidence-based balneology”, while there are lots of medical doctors and professors here, and while balneology is an established speciality in medicine in quite a few countries in Europe, it is still a field that lies on the fringes of medicine. For instance, in Sweden, balneology is not an established discipline of medicine, and MDs cannot become specialized in this field, as they can in e.g. cardiology, or hepatology. Therefore, balneology is to some extent similar to other alternative treatments, such as yoga, regular exercise and gym-based personal trainers, health coaches, etc. They exist in society, they work with health, there is some scientific support for the health benefits of these activities, but they are to a large extent not integrated in conventional healthcare. This is where the activities and visions of STRATIF-AI can contribute. Our ambition is to go from a doctor-centric fragmented system, to an integrated patient-centric eco-system system (see picture below). In this eco-system, e.g. personal trainers can take over where nurses leave a patient, following a health conversation (as in our clinical study 2 in STRATIF-AI). And in this eco-system, one can add new actors, such as spas and kurorts, as long as there is evidence that their methods work, and as long as the underlying mechanisms can be added to the digital twin’s models and visualizations.
The 2h session we will have is structured as follows: First, Gunnar Cedersund, the coordinator of STRATIF-AI gives an overview of STRATIF-AI, and of the digital twins, which converts knowledge and data to computational models. Thereafter Prof Gelu Onose from SCUBA (in the picture above), and his colleagues Constantin Munteanu and Cristina Popescu (both MDs), give an overview of the scientific basis for prevention and treatment of stroke using different modalities, including balneology. Thereafter, we look at the data integration aspects: Jesper Fellenius from Z2 gives an overview of the personal data vault, Cati Martinez from University of Murcia talks about their work with semantic harmonization and inter-operability, and SIMAVI talk about their work on Electronic Healthcare Records, and app developments, e.g. for rehabilitation of stroke. The session is concluded with a round-table discussion. All things can be followed online, at this link. The general link to the conference is available here.
Tomorrow, May 21, 2024, we are arranging a new edition of the BME@LIU-day. BME stands for biomedical engineering, i.e. the interplay between biomedicine (from basic science to clinical practice) and engineering. In practice, BME, entails fields such as modelling and AI, digital twins, wearable sensors, new biomaterials, eHealth, bioinformatics, imaging, bio-optics, etc etc. BME is therefore also one of the core areas of LIU, and it is – in fact – one of the reasons why Linköping university (LIU) was founded, in 1975: to create a bridge between the needs for new engineers at SAAB, and the need for new biomedical research and personnel at the hospital. Around this need, LIU was founded, and at the heart of this dream of a bridge between these two worlds was the Department of Biomedical Engineering (IMT).
IMT eventually attracted Gunnar Cedersund, who started there gradually from around 2011, and then gradually moved his research group over to this department. IMT has since then also expanded its mission to support biomedical engineering beyond its own department, i.e. at the university level. And the arrangement of this BME@LIU-day is a central part of this new broader mission.
In practice, the day will feature a lot of activities at LiU, and also a lot of our own activities. For instance: at 10-10.30, postdoc William Lövfors and MD/Ph.D. student Valentin Kindesjö will introduce the latest developments of our digital twins, using a so-called double presentation where a clinician and an engineer each presents from their specific perspective. In the same session on modelling and AI, at 10.50-11.10, we also see presentations by our newly transitioned postdoc Nicolas Sundqvist, who will present a new story, where we quantify the importance of different cell types for the neurovascular coupling. Finally, also in that session, at 11.20-11.40, we have one of our newest postdocs, Dirk de Weerd, who presents a work he has done together with our incoming postdoc Rasmus Magnusson, on the usage of Variational AutoEncoders, to identify a compressed space for gene expression variations, and apply this to disease modelling. A final oral presentation, not by us, but by one of our closest collaborators, is that 10.50-11.10 by Jesper Fellenius, who will present his perspectives from 20 years of app developments for commercial companies (Ericsson, Swedbank etc) and his 75 MSEK development of a personal data vault. Link to the modelling presentation is here and link to Jesper’s session is here.
Finally, apart from oral presentations, we will also be featured in various places in the poster session combined with the arena. There will be 6 student-based posters, who present 6 large B.Sc. projects, on various modelling tasks within the digital twin development: i) on blood pressure and exercise, ii) on exercise and VO2max, iii) on dysfunctional fat storage in large adipocytes and liver fat, iv) on the neurovascular coupling, v) on drugs and cognitive function, and vi) on alcohol metabolism. Apart from that, there will be many other research-based posters from our group. Finally, we will also – for the first time – be featured not only by our original spin-off company SUND sound medical decisions, but by the newly created daughter company with Z2 and Johan Holmsäter – with the working title Lev Skönare.
All these companies and research projects will be featured with oral presentations, posters, or exhibitions, where you also can test to create your own digital twin, if you want.
On Friday, Gunnar Cedersund will give a lecture in the NBIS AI seminar series. NBIS is the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden, which is a core-facility spread out over all universities in Sweden. In other words, at each university in Sweden, there are some local bioinformaticians located, which helps out in projects. NBIS also arranges a seminar series on artificial intelligence (AI), and the next such lecture – on Friday May 17, at 10AM CET – features Gunnar Cedersund. Gunnar will talk about our digital twins, and about how they can be used to integrate a variety of data, both classical bioinformatics multi-omics data and behavioral and imaging data, into a personal data vault, and into a personalized copy of a patients. More information, abstract, and link to the online lecture is available here: https://scilifelab.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IJC/pages/2780758082/Meeting+59+2024-05-17
This year, we got a double jackpot from the Swedish Research Council – who gave us glowing reviews for the 3R project, scaling from microphysiological in vitro systems to humans using scalable digital twins.
In Sweden, the Swedish Research Council (Swe: Vetenskapsrådet, VR), is the most central research grant, and it is often considered a key quality stamp of a top researcher to have at least one grant from VR. Therefore, competition is usually fierce (acceptance rate usually is 5-15%), and it is not at all guaranteed that you get money, even if you have a competitive application. Therefore, I am proud to say that this year, I got not only one grant, but two – and that the evaluation from the reviewers was unusually high and glowing.
The project I have gotten the review responses for so far is a special call on 3R, i.e. Replacement, Reduction and Refinement of animal experiments. This is a topic, I have been very active in ever since 2015, when I was awarded the first edition of the prize “Nytänkaren” (the thinker of new ideas), by the Swedish Fund for Research without Animal Experiments. The project extends on our experimental work, both within the group, doing cell biology cultures using 13C-labelled metabolites on liver and adipose tissue taken from surgery), and that in collaboration with AstraZeneca, centered around organs-on-a-chip, i.e. small microphysiological systems (MPS), with organoids and spheroids consisting of human cells (Fig A, recent paper). In the project, we will i) analyse these in vitro data using mechanistic modelling to get more information out of the data (e.g. metabolic fluxes), ii) plan new experiments, by first doing the experiments in the computer, and iii) translate the results to humans, by e.g. scaling the volumes of the spheroids to human sizes, and by adding the missing organs, which allows us to re-assemble the digital twin in the computer (Fig B-C, Step 1 and 2). The project will evaluate and quantify the benefits of this for e.g. drug development, and we will disseminate the results to pharma, scientists, and regulatory agencies (Fig C, Step 3).
In the evaluation, we only got 6s and 7s, which means that we were among the highest rated of all applicants, even among the few who got money (6 out of 56). The ranking is from 1-7, where a “normal, decent” scientist usually get a 3 (meaning “good”), and where you need at least a mixture of 5s and 6s to have any chance of getting money. If you get all 6s, you are usually getting the money for sure, and 7 is only very rarely given out (I was a reviewer for ~60 applicants two years ago, and then I think only one or possibly two got a 7 on any criterion). Therefore, I am very grateful that this year, I got only 6s and higher, and that two(!) categories got a 7: “merits of applicant” and “relevance for 3R” (Fig D). If the rating levels were the same as when I was a reviewer, I would – I think – have been number one of all applicants that year, and in any case, I must have been among the very top of all the 56 applicants also this year.
The life of a scientist is filled with many many rejected applications, so when you get a jackpot once in a while, it is important to stop a bit – and celebrate! Because tomorrow, it is time to get started working on the new exciting research projects! 🙂