Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart Project Achieves New Milestones in Patient Care

Dassault Systèmes outlined, at the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum North America in mid-October, multiple milestones in its Living Heart Project. This model is aimed to drive the creation and use of simulated 3D personalized hearts in the treatment, diagnosis and prevention of heart diseases, according to the company.

The Living Heart is now available through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud, offering high-performance computing (HPC) to even small medical device companies. Any life sciences company can immediately access a complete, on-demand HPC environment to scale up virtual testing securely and collaboratively while managing infrastructure costs, the company reports.

“Medical devices need thousands of tests in the development stage,” says Joe Formicola, president and chief engineer, Caelynx. “With the move of the Living Heart to the cloud, effectively an unlimited number of tests of a new design can be carried out simultaneously using the simulated heart rather than one at a time, dramatically lowering the barrier to innovation, not to mention the time and cost.”

The Living Heart Project has grown to more than 95 member organizations worldwide including medical researchers, practitioners, device manufacturers and regulatory agencies united in a mission of open innovation to solve healthcare challenges, according to Dassault Systèmes. The project has supported 15 research grant proposals by providing access to the model, associated technologies and project expertise. Novel use of the model to understand heart disease and study the safety and effectiveness of medical devices has appeared in eight articles published in peer-reviewed journals to date.

For the first time, the Living Heart was used to simulate detailed drug interactions affecting the entire organ function. Researchers at Stanford University working with UberCloud recently used the Living Heart as a platform for a model that would enable pharmaceutical companies to test drugs for the risk of inducing cardiac arrhythmias.

“The Living Heart Project is a strategic part of a broader effort by Dassault Systèmes to leverage its advanced simulation applications to push the boundaries of science,” says Jean Colombel, vice president of life sciences, Dassault Systèmes. “By creating both a community and a transformational platform we are beginning to see the advances from the Living Heart Project being used for additional aspects of cardiovascular research as well as for other parts of the body, for example the brain, the spine, the foot, and the eye, to reach new frontiers in patient care.”

For more info, visit Dassault Systèmes.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.