Connecting health innovations around the patient: MyTwin Lab at Ynov Campus’s Scientific Council

The MyTwin project first grew out of nearly twenty years of professional experience in health prevention and innovation.

But its origin is also deeply personal.

After standing by his mother through her illness, until her death in hospital in a context marked notably by a medical error, then losing his father to a cancer that was not detected or prevented well enough, Rubens Valcy faced a paradox: how can so many medical innovations exist, when they so often remain unknown or hard to reach for the patients who could benefit from them?

In hospitals, laboratories, startups and research centres, many technologies are already used to better screen, visualise, analyse, predict or personalise patient care.

Yet these innovations often remain fragmented.

A technology may be available in one hospital but not in another. A solution used by some doctors or some patients may remain completely unknown to the general public.

MyTwin’s first mission was born of this observation: identify and map the best existing health solutions and services, then bring them together in a single environment to make them easier to access.

The goal is to link technologies that, today, still too often work in isolation.

Health data analysis, biomarkers, artificial intelligence, medical imaging, 3D models, voice analysis or prevention tools: the challenge is not only to create new technologies, but also to make the existing ones work better together.

MyTwin was therefore designed as a platform able to gradually connect these technological building blocks around one individual and their health data.

This logic led to the creation of MyTwin Lab.

Its ambition is to bring researchers, health professionals, engineers, startups, patients and technology partners together around a common goal: building one of the most advanced patient digital twins in the world.

The principle of the digital twin is to create an evolving digital representation of a patient from their health data, as explained in MyTwin’s guide to the patient digital twin.

The more the quantity and diversity of available data grow, the more precise this representation can become.

But the value of a digital twin does not lie only in representing the patient.

It lies above all in its ability to simulate.

Eventually, a health digital twin should make it possible to explore different scenarios before they happen in the real world.

It could notably help to simulate:

• how certain health indicators might evolve;
• different prevention scenarios;
• a patient’s potential response to a medicine;
• certain surgical interventions;
• the impact of changes in behaviour or lifestyle;
• or the potential onset of certain health risks.

This ability to simulate opens the way to a medicine that is ever more predictive, preventive, proactive and personalised, the direction set out in MyTwin Lab’s research vision.

The goal is no longer only to intervene once a disease appears, but to gradually understand individual health trajectories, so as to act earlier.

Artificial intelligence and health technologies are advancing on a global scale. Data, scientific research, AI models and technological innovation naturally cross borders.

Building a digital twin of the human body can therefore only be a collective, international venture.

The point is therefore not to build alone, but to know how to connect innovations, wherever they come from, and to bring researchers, doctors, engineers, healthcare institutions and startups together around them.

That is precisely the ambition of MyTwin Lab: creating an open space where technologies, science, data and expertise can be brought together, to speed up the move from innovation to concrete use for patients.