Alfonso Valencia, an international reference in computational biology, speaks at the CiMUS of the USC about the challenges of digital twins in medicine

• The Director of the Life Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) researcher will deliver a lecture this Friday, January 23, at 1:00 p.m., in the Theatre Room of the CiMUS (Avenida de Barcelona, s/n, Santiago de Compostela).

Prof. Alfonso Valencia will speak at the CiMUS of the USC about the development of “virtual copies” of patients to advance personalized medicine, improve and accelerate diagnosis, and prevent certain diseases such as cancer. The lecture, co-financed by FEDER funds, will take place this Friday, January 23, at 1:00 p.m. in the Centre’s Theatre Room.

The Director of the Life Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) and an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) researcher is a pioneer of computational biology in Spain and an international reference in this field.

In his lecture “From Genomes to Digital Twins: Developments and Challenges,” open to the entire university community, he will reflect on the challenges of Artificial Intelligence in medicine and on how data mining and the application of ICTs can enable more personalized, effective, and safer treatments, as well as the prevention of certain types of cancer or potential relapses.

The construction of digital patient models using large volumes of data, computational power, and appropriate software makes it possible to reproduce diseases with considerable fidelity, enabling better approaches to their study and treatment. “For now, the models that simulate cells are different from those that simulate organs, and from those that simulate the behavior of the whole organism. The challenge is to be able to integrate all three types of models,” explains Professor Valencia.