The health of each person is a unique combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors Not everyone who has a disease has it for the same reasons or with the same severity. For example in asthma, a patient may be a mild, moderate, or severe asthmatic. In obesity, two people who weigh the same may have different genetic pre-dispositions, exercise routines, or eating habits. These natural variations add to the difficulty of treating disease. Some estimate that even a successful drug only works in 30-40% of patients who take it.

Entelos is able to create virtual patients because of the way the Company builds its PhysioLab disease systems. The first step is to model human health. This allows researchers to draw from a large volume of data about normal physiology, in addition to disease data, and ensures that PhysioLab systems are of a high enough quality to maintain the stability and dynamics of a homeostatic system. The model is validated by running simulations and comparing virtual experimental results to known experimental results on the molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole patient levels.

Within Entelos PhysioLab systems, scientists can represent patient variability in a potentially unlimited number of virtual patients, where each one represents a subpopulation of real patients. Virtual patients play a central role in the collaborative process that we use in our in silico R&D Collaborations & Alliances.

After modeling human health, a disease state is introduced parametrically, based on disease data, creating virtual patients by changing variables within the system. In simple terms, a representative healthy human is "given" a disease, creating a virtual patient. Entelos can create many virtual patients that represent known and hypothesized causes for the disease and, using biosimulation experiments, test therapies to understand a patient's likely response to treatment. Virtual patients respond differently to treatment depending on their lifestyle and why they have the disease just as subpopulations of actual patients would in the clinic. But unlike clinical trials, PhysioLab technology allows researchers to know how each virtual patient is different and they can use that information to understand why the response is different.