In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, physicians were shrunk down to microscopic size to travel inside the human body and save a dying patient. Now, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine are
using virtual reality goggles to bring that fantasy to life—with the
aim of improving cancer care.
The virtual world that Alex Sigaras, a research associate in
computational biomedicine at WCM’s Englander Institute for
Precision Medicine, has developed consists entirely of protein
molecules. His technology allows doctors to swim through and
around a patient’s proteins—almost literally. When users don a
virtual reality headset, they see colorfully labeled 3D renderings
Virtual Vision
3D technology could offer a potent weapon in cancer care
of protein folds overhead and underfoot; using hand gestures
and other movements, they can enlarge the protein, shrink it,
or change its orientation. Touch-activated drop-down menus
allow users to highlight certain parts of the protein model or read
additional background information.
Sigaras’s technology—which he developed under the mentorship of Olivier Elemento, PhD, associate professor of physiology
and biophysics and of computational genomics in computational
biomedicine and associate director of the HRH Prince Alwaleed
Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational
Biomedicine—is designed to help physicians better treat cancer
A
B
B
OT
T
