We are excited to announce that we have secured new funding from ALF, the state-funded research program for clinical research in collaboration with Swedish regions. The grant has been awarded to Gunnar Cedersund, the coordinator of STRATIF-AI, for a project titled “Implementation and Evaluation of a Digital Twin-Based eHealth Application for Preventive Health Dialogues.”
This project is directly linked to Clinical Study 2 within STRATIF-AI, which assesses our application designed for use during and after preventive health dialogues at primary healthcare centers. In this study, we will compare standard clinical practice with 300 health dialogues incorporating the new app.
With this additional funding, we can enhance app development and expand the clinical study to include 400 patients. The project will span three years, with an annual budget of 900,000 SEK, totaling approximately 3 million SEK (around 300,000 EUR). This support will significantly bolster our efforts in the field of preventive healthcare.
In this workshop, which will be held the 5th of November, we will discuss hybrid approaches, combining traditional bioinformatics and machine learning, with new generative AI approaches and mechanistically based digital twins. This combination of methods is ideal for dealing with a variety of different data types, and for developing AI models that are explainable and trustworthy. The event will feature keynote lectures, talks selected from abstracts, a poster session, and will be in hybrid format. Link to more info here:
A few weeks ago, on June 10, STRATIF-AI had its first meeting with fellow EU projects funded under the same call, all focusing on the use of AI for improved patient stratification. This initial two-hour meeting served as an introduction to each project and a discussion of key shared challenges (see Figure below). These challenges include data interoperability, federated learning, trustworthy and explainable AI (xAI), and MDR certifications.
During the meeting, we presented some core concepts of STRATIF-AI, such as our hybrid approach that combines multi-level, multi-timescale, and multi-organ simulations using mechanistic models as inputs to machine-learning models. This hybrid approach enhances the explainability of our models.
Furthermore, we explained shortly how STRATIF-AI uses data harmonization in two places: i) in connection to the federated learning set up by a collaboration between Catalina Martinez Costa (University of Murcia) and Lucia Gregorio Rodriguez (TREE), and ii) in connection to integrating a copy data from a variety of different sources into a personal data vault (Jesper Fellenius at Z2).
This collaboration and network of related projects will be useful for us to use in various related topics as we move forward, and we from STRATIF-AI are looking forward to new meetings. Thanks to the team at PREPARE for setting this meeting up.
On April 11-12, we had a new bi-yearly meeting in STRATIF-AI. This meeting was held in beautiful Nottwil, Switzerland, where the Swiss Paraplegic Research center (SPF) is situated. SPF is responsible for the work with policy and actions toward stakeholders to achieve ultimate clinical implementation, and they were also the hosts of this event.
We have these events every 6 months, and they serve both the purpose of team building and increased understanding of each others’ perspectives and serve to help us focus on the most urgent and timely topics. This time we focused primarily on the design of the 6 clinical studies, which ethical applications were to be submitted at the end of that month. Four of these studies are dedicated to the collection of patient data, aimed at training both the machine learning algorithms and the mechanistic aspects of digital twins. The remaining two studies focus on the real-world testing of eHealth apps within clinical settings. The largest of those will test whether the digital twin improves clinical health conversations, in 300 patients, compared with 300 matched controls.
Overall, the meeting was a success, and we have now passed the planning phase of the project, with requirement specifications and ethical plans, and are now moving into action: into prototype development of the apps, and towards the first pilot studies.
Our EU project STRATIF-AI (https://stratif-ai.eu/en), in which we develop digital twins for prevention, acute treatment and rehabilitation of stroke, was presented as part of “Clinical applications of computer modeling” at Latin American Summer School for Computational Neuroscience (LASCON) in Sao Paulo Brazil Jan 2024.
Figure shows how modern medicine has been changing and indicates role of modeling in modern (future) clinical practice — part of personalized medicine, data-mining, self-monitoring, omics, surgical planning, medical education, research, screening, etc
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! 🙂
CompBioMed Conference 2023 (CBMC23) will address all aspects of computational biomedicine, from genome through organ to whole human and population levels, embracing data driven, mechanistic modelling and simulation, machine learning and combinations thereof. This year Gunnar will is one of the Plenary Speakers and he will discuss physiologically based digital twins: a digital and interactive copy of yourself that follows you throughout your health journey.
