How can life sciences and healthcare thrive in the metaverse?

Enabling immutable, anonymous, encrypted data and rich experiences, Web 3.0 opens a world of opportunity for healthcare and life sciences.

In brief

• The shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 goes hand in hand with increased collaboration and community ownership.
• Healthcare – especially patients – and the life sciences industry stand to benefit from opportunities in the metaverse.
• The decentralized space could be used for safe and secure patient-physician interactions or even clinical trials.

The metaverse is shaping up to be the next frontier in the ongoing digital transformation. Various corporate and government stakeholders are investing in digital cities – and all the opportunities they promise.

Community and collaboration in a decentralized space

The metaverse is enabled by a shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, a move from “read and write” to “read, write, own and participate”.  It also marks a change in the business model. Until now, our passive role as users of internet-based services has been highly lucrative for Big Tech. In fact, it’s our data that drives their profits. It’s a business based on trust – an increasingly fragile model amid all-too-frequent data privacy breaches.

Web 3.0 – the enabler of the metaverse – is a significant departure from this paradigm. Users are still crucial, but as drivers rather than passengers in the overall experience. Built on open-source software by an open community of co-developers, the metaverse is all about community and collaboration. Users take ownership of their own data, and protect it by building on immutable, anonymous, encrypted DLT-based systems like blockchain. Offering a fresh take on both infrastructure and governance, blockchain offers much more scope for customization and innovation. The flip side of decentralization is a lack of central governance. Particularly where sensitive data is concerned, this is something that the community of users, alongside policymakers, is currently addressing.

All this is forcing a radical rethink in the way companies approach digital opportunities. Companies need to collaborate and put the community first if they are to unlock the opportunities on offer. We believe the life sciences and healthcare sectors – and patients in particular – stand to emerge as major winners in the move toward metaverse.

Immersive experience for patients and physicians

As the metaverse evolves and virtual reality (VR) hardware improves, the immersive experience will also increasingly approach – or even exceed – real life. The potential for interaction between patient and doctor avatars opens up new opportunities for consultation and even treatment. The patient avatar would carry the real patient’s electronic medical records, giving the doctor a full picture of their health background. Medical advisory services – nutrition advice, addiction counseling and telemedicine in general – could be carried out from the comfort of the users’ home, and eliminate geographic, mobility and social barriers. For example, patients may feel less anxious discussing sensitive diseases such as breast or testicular cancer in a virtual educational setting. Some physical examinations can even be performed virtually if sufficient data is provided by the sensors, cameras or wearables accessed by the real-world patient.

Immersive VR and augmented reality (AR) are set to change the experience of healthcare stakeholders in many different ways. For example, it’s an ideal environment to tackle phobias, exercise from home or learn new skills. Patients can confront their fears of spiders, heights or flying safe in the knowledge that they are not truly exposed. Elderly patients can take part in entertainment and fitness programs from home. Display key information from a package insert, such as daily dosage or typical reactions, by simply looking at a medicine package. Medical students and physicians can practice complex procedures in silico before working on real patients. Conjoined twins Bernardo and Arthur Lima benefited from precisely this when a team of 100 medical professionals successfully separated them after many months of VR training and practice based on scans and other medical information about the twins.

This is a trend that’s set to continue. An innovative medical software company has redefined setup and workflow of the operating room and surgical team by using mixed reality and machine learning. The company reported the first reconstructive surgery using the proprietary surgical system in October 2022.

The potential of the metaverse has not gone unnoticed by real-world healthcare players, and locations like Dubai – already known for their extensive metaverse investment programs – also feature among metaverse healthcare pioneers. Projects include a new medical facility in the metaverse and plans to set up a metaverse hospital in the United Arab Emirates.

Digital twins to accelerate clinical trials

Various industries recognize the potential of digital twins – virtual models designed to reflect real word objects or beings. With enough data, the digital twin model can be realistic and accurate enough to run simulations with real-life value. This is a highly attractive possibility for life sciences companies. For example, pharmaceutical companies invest significant financial and staff resources in clinical trials. Using a digital twin would allow much quicker and safer clinical trials, which would bring much-needed drugs to market more quickly, and also save costs. In the metaverse, you can also separate organs or physical systems from the overall organism, enabling a more nuanced approach. Pharmaceutical companies are already exploring how to create an exact digital twin of a human body so it seems likely that virtual clinical trials will soon be part of the clinical testing landscape.

Extracting value from data

Patient data has always been highly sensitive and valuable to other stakeholders. Anonymized data sets are a staple of life sciences and healthcare research, but the conditions for sharing it are strict and the patients themselves tend to give general consent – and get nothing in return. Web 3.0, and in particular non-fungible tokens (NFTs), create the infrastructure to change this. As a key enabler of the metaverse, NFTs allow ownership and value to be encoded and transferred. Informed and willing users could monetize their health data and make it available as an NFT to pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders. As people become more willing and accustomed to using wearables to track everyday habits, the value of this data is set to increase. Against this background, it’s also worth noting that patients in the metaverse have full control over access to their data, and can share it with apps or healthcare providers without having to rely on an intermediary, which these days will all too often be a global player with a monopoly. It’s an attractive business model for both sides.

The enthusiasm around data is slightly dampened by as yet unresolved privacy and regulatory issues, which are particularly important given the sensitive nature of health data. Coming up with ways to protect privacy in a public blockchain remains one of the key challenges of our times. Nightfall, EY’s zero knowledge proof (ZKP) technology, is one way organizations can balance transparency and privacy on a public blockchain.

Multiplying benefits

Overall, the metaverse advantages for healthcare and life sciences stakeholders are clear to see, with highlights including better surgical efficiency, enhanced access to therapy and counselling, full patient control over data and accelerated trials. It’s important to see the metaverse in the context of other transformative developments. As we enter the age of personalized medicine, for example, reliable and secure health data becomes even more valuable for patients and the physicians treating them. And improved data and analytics plus predictive capabilities could make the metaverse the perfect place to perform clinical trials.