Transcending Time, Space, and Resources via Life Virtualization
Vaccine and drug development can take several years owing to lengthy clinical trials on real humans that also frequently result in failure due to safety issues or low efficacy. In addition, development requires an astronomical amount of labor, funds, and administrative work. It is also likely that trials on humans (and other animals like mice) will become more restrictive and even prohibitive in the future.
We believe that the fundamental change in direction that we must take is to virtualize humans, more generally, all lifeforms, and conduct tests on them using computers, transcending time, space, and resources. Virtualized humans can behave exactly the same as real humans do, so we can instantly and safely test drugs and vaccines on hundreds of thousands of virtual humans representing various populations, health conditions, and diseases. A future version of OmVisim, likely to be rolled out in 2026, will support virtual humans with details to be described in a later blog post.
Figure 1. Virtualization of all lifeforms
The virtualization of life is a key innovation that will yield the first true metaverse. The metaverse has become a common topic of interest in the past few years with several large companies attempting to create the first versions. These versions, while impressive, lack the fundamental component of true virtualization of life. This meaningful simulation of biosystems is an important step in the creation of the first true metaverse, which must contain a way of representing lifeforms in the virtual world.
Our lifeform virtualization platform, which will evolve to support more complex organisms over time, will allow for the virtualization of lifeforms spanning every level of complexity from single cell organisms like E. coli to virtual humans. Later versions of our virtualization platform will also support the realization of lifeforms from the virtualized organisms into true physical manifestations of the lifeform. This is another hallmark of our true metaverse, as the lifeforms we virtualize can be manifested into real life.
Figure 2. Drug and vaccine development is a slow process involving various phases that include increasingly large sample sizes. Acquiring a representative sample is very costly and time-consuming. Using virtual humans, we will be able to reduce this administrative burden and facilitate drug and vaccine development at an unprecedented speed.
Drug and vaccine development is crucial to extending our life expectancy. This important process has been fine-tuned over human development, but it remains prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the major pharmaceutical companies to carry them out. The average costs for phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials are $4 million, $13 million, and $20 million respectively. This severely hinders drug development as only major companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Bayer, Pfizer, and Hoffman-La Roche are able to afford the costs. Additionally, gathering sufficient human samples to carry out these studies takes significant time, usually taking at least half a year and sometimes over a decade. This may expose humans in the sample population to potentially dangerous chemicals as they take new medications.
The Omphalos approach will utilize virtual humans for the clinical trial sample population. These virtualized humans will be functionally identical to real humans, and can simulate trials of any desired medication. This will cut the costs of these trials immensely, as pharmaceutical companies will be able to gather a human sample population near instantaneously.
Figure 3. Food development and approval by government agencies such as the FDA are slow, expensive, labor-intensive and often do not yield successful results. Using our approach, we can perform food testing for safety, nutrition, and long-term effects entirely in silico, enabling faster and more effective food testing.
Similarly to the drug development and approval process, food development is costly and time-consuming. Approaches such as selective breeding, focused genetic modifications, and food product development require large amounts of time due to limiting factors such as livestock/crop growth rates. There’s also never a guarantee that new food products will yield the expected results, so sometimes these often decade long processes result in no usable product. We believe the solution to this problem lies in the virtualization of life.
By virtualizing livestock and edible plants, we can easily perform genetic modifications and carry out the entire development process in silico. This removes numerous barriers to food development, enabling quick-time design and debugging that eliminates the majority of associated costs. It further enables us to trial hypothetical new foods in a timely manner, rather than taking years to develop new food sources and run risks of them being unusable.
In order to achieve our goal of virtualizing all lifeforms, we will need to utilize some of our core technologies including L++ and our biovisualization and simulation platform, OmVisim.
Over the course of four major product releases, we will be targeting different levels of life in each iteration. Our first version, which will be released on December 22nd, 2022, will support the virtualization of microorganisms such as E. coli. If you’re interested in reading more about this version, check out our blog post, Our first virtual organism, E. coli version 0.1. This version will support biomedical education, as students interested in biology will be able to gain a thorough understanding by designing biosystems in L++.
The next version of our virtualization platform will support more complex organisms such as C. elegans. The third version will focus on the virtualization of humans. Finally, the fourth version will feature synthetic biology functionalities to enable the realization of the organism code into real physical organisms. We’ll discuss this final version in future blog posts.
As lifeform virtualization becomes commonplace upon the release of each of our versions, we believe a community of life programmers will arise cultivating a community of life developers sharing lifecode in a new market of biocode.
I hope you have enjoyed reading, we are very excited to share more about the advancements that will be made possible using our virtualization technology. As always, please stay connected if you are interested in learning more, and please consider sharing our blog with your friends!
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