Virtual Bodies For Real Drugs: In Silico Clinical Trials Are The Future

When looking at an in silico clinical trial specifically, it means an individualized computer simulation used in the development or regulatory evaluation of a medicinal product, device, or intervention. While completely simulated clinical trials are not feasible with current technology and understanding of biology, their development would be expected to have major benefits over current in vivo clinical trials, and the FDA is already planning for a future in which more than half of all clinical trial data will come from computer simulations.

Moreover, artificial intelligence can also provide answers to the usually asked question: “why does this work for this patient but not another one?” A.I-building methods, namely machine learning and deep learning have the potential to train a model that will then be able to find patterns and clusters in otherwise unstructured data – and seek out information researchers didn’t expect to be there. In addition, neural networks can be used to predict adverse events or to anticipate the possible risk of patient drop out and compliance to the treatment.

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