DIGI-HEART: The digital cardiac mapping tool based on Digital Twins

There is a paradigm shift in the way medicine is understood in the 21st century. During the last century, medicine had a generalist approach, where one treatment was applicable to all patients with the same disease. Advances in genomics and proteomics at the end of the last century have confirmed what we already knew, that no two organisms are identical. This is why medicine today focuses on personalised treatments that can improve people’s health. These treatments also take into account differences in anatomy, hence the importance of simulation systems that make it possible to reproduce organs of individual people.

Within this field, the DIGI-Heart project is developing a software to digitally simulate the real cardiac environment of any patient (digital twins) thanks to the close collaboration between Corify Care, GENESIS Biomed and AseBio as an Innovative Business Group (“Agrupación Empresarial Innovadora” or AEI). The idea of the company, which is just three years old and which was born in the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, has been supported by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism with 300,000 euros. The existence of these digital twins will make it possible to evaluate both the impact of current pharmacological therapies and the impact of medical devices under development on the heart quickly and safely.

Corify Care, the company developing the solution, has extensive experience in the cardiovascular area and has already developed a previous product, ACORYS®, a cardiac mapping medical device to transform the arrhythmia treatment process. AseBio acts as the partner responsible for project management and GENESIS Biomed carries out the business activities to facilitate the solution reaching the market.

We spoke to Berta Tenas and Alberto Rodríguez, both senior consultants at GENESIS Biomed, about the objectives, challenges and expectations of DIGI-Heart.

¿How did the initiative and the collaboration come about?

Personalised precision medicine is one of the major trends of the last decade in the health sector. Since its inception, Corify Care has sought to improve treatment and adapt the therapeutic approach according to the physiological characteristics of the patient thanks to ACORYS®, a tool that seeks to change the paradigm in the treatment of cardiovascular pathologies.

The DIGI-Heart project is in line with the company’s philosophy and mission to develop a tool for preclinical studies using digital twins technologies to predict cardiac responses and effects to pharmacological treatments or medical devices under development.

Corify Care is the first spin-off of the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón that was created in 2019. GENESIS Biomed has been supporting CORIFY, even before its constitution. In 2107, through the Caixa Impulse programme, Josep Lluis Falco, CEO of GENESIS Biomed, collaborated in the preparation of the business plan and later in the constitution process. Since then, strategic support has been offered to the company, helping it to obtain public funds such as RETOS Colaboración, 2 innovation projects financed by EIT Health (AFFINE 2019 and SAVECOR in 2022), NEOTEC among others, and private funds for a value of 2.35 M€, through the Capital Cell platform and the investment of Clave Capital and the CDTI through its Innvierte programme.

We always talk about the importance of collaboration in our sector. What role does it play in this particular project?

The collaboration within this consortium is crucial for the development and implementation of the solution in the market. Each of the partners from their area of expertise will contribute their knowledge for the technological development and subsequent commercialisation of the solution.

Corify Care as technological leader of the project for the development and validation of the solution developed within the DIGI-Heart project.

GENESIS Biomed as leader in the business area for the development of market analysis activities and business development activities for the commercialisation of the solution.

AseBio as national catalyst for the collaboration with other national market players as well as for the coordination and management of the project.

What would you say is the project’s strongest point and biggest challenge?

The first differentiating factor of the project is the innovative capacity of the solution to be developed in the area of digital pre-clinical/clinical trials. It is a solution that will allow a better prognosis of the effects of pharmacological treatments or medical devices during their development, and this will allow prioritisation of those with the best safety profiles. It will be a solution that will allow the acceleration of clinical phases, which will shorten the long development times and save costs. This will allow those studies where it is used to have shorter timescales and be marketed earlier.

Another of the project’s differentiating factors is the complementary nature of the consortium members and their extensive experience in the healthcare field, capable of covering all the most relevant areas to ensure the success of the project.

What role does GENESIS Biomed play?

GENESIS Biomed, as an expert in biomedical consultancy, will be responsible for the economic validation of the DIGI-Heart business model, and for preparing, analysing and advancing market exploitation, starting by providing this solution, as a preclinical work tool, to AseBio’s partners.

Thus, the fundamental role of GENESIS Biomed will be to ensure the implementation of the tool in the market.

Your vision for the future of this research area through your project, etc.

Thanks to this project, DIGI-Heart will provide the first tool for conducting pre-clinical and clinical trials on human digital twins, allowing the use of new compounds to be evaluated and increasing the safety of subsequent clinical studies, while reducing risks and costs.

Finally, the project’s vision for the future is to improve patient prognosis and treatments.