VHT INITIATIVE
A Virtual Human Twin is an integrated multi-level, -time, and -discipline digital representation of a body, organ, or cell enabling the comprehensive characterisation of the physiological and the pathological state in its heterogeneity, allowing patient-specific predictions for the prevention, prediction, screening, diagnosis and treatment of a disease, as well as the evaluation, optimisation, selection, personalization, and de-risking of intervention options.
“The VHT is a bold step” (Sandra Gallina, DG SANTE, 21/11/2025) in addressing key challenges in healthcare, including rising costs, the growing demand for personalized medicine, and the need for more efficient healthcare systems. By leveraging advanced in silico technologies such as computer modelling, simulation, and artificial intelligence, supported by state-of-the-art computational infrastructure and data technologies, the VHT enables the creation of virtual representations of human physiology and pathology. These virtual models offer insights into disease progression across scales of time, space, and organ systems, paving the way for personalized, predictive, and preventive care, accelerating medical research, and improving support for clinicians, patients, and healthcare providers.
The VHT initiative emphasizes both generating new scientific knowledge and applying it to enhance clinical care. Its realization requires collaborative efforts at a European level, including the establishment of a dedicated VHT infrastructure. In order to achieve its core goals, the VHT initiative furthermore requires work on pooling resources and expertise, data sharing and interoperability, credibility and trust, as well as economic sustainability. As such the VHT initiative will provide a systematic, ever-growing digital and quantitative representation of the actionable knowledge available on human pathophysiology. Its federated public infrastructure will enable the pooling of resources and assets (data, models, algorithms, computing power, storage etc.) to develop Digital Twins in healthcare and assess their credibility. A collaborative, diverse, and engaged ecosystem [link the previous bold-face text to the ‘join’ tab] will facilitate the uptake of the VHT across all sectors and R&D phases, including clinical practice, with full respect of ethical, legal, and social considerations.
Realizing the vision of the VHT, requires development on a wide range of topics, including technology, infrastructure, standards, regulatory processes, ELSI (ethical, legal and social issues), users, uptake, as well as business models and sustainability. Collaboration between researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and industry stakeholders is essential to establish robust technical solutions, ethical guidelines, and regulatory frameworks.