Extending the lives of Barça players (and who knows, maybe the entire population)

BarcelonaThe avalanche of injuries suffered the first men's team of Barça There will be fewer and fewer replays. Perfecting performance and preventing physical setbacks from accumulating in a grueling schedule will be easier thanks to technology that the club, through the Barça Innovation Hub (BIHUB), has been developing with the company Omniscope for several months. Using cellular avatars of each player, generated from genetic data and physical samples, doctors, physiotherapists, and coaches will be able to predict injuries, detect illnesses, and optimize the athletes' health. The project is already being implemented, although the club emphasizes that "it is not yet used for making day-to-day decisions for the teams," as Dr. Gil Rodas, BIHUB's medical director, acknowledged in statements to this newspaper. However, it has a very clear objective: "To run simulations to adapt and improve existing medical protocols to optimize the prevention, diagnosis, and recovery of muscle injuries."

The proponents of this advancement not only assume it will change sports medicine, but that it will eventually be applied to the general population. "We want to extend people's lives. We've brought science to sports, and now the next step is for everyone to benefit from it." This is the emphatic statement of Omniscope CEO and co-founder Vijay Vaswani, who spoke to ARA via video call. He was accompanied by Holger Heyn, the genomic analysis specialist who developed the avatars and tried to explain: "We read single cells, which are the smallest individual physical expression in the body. We see how they react to external and internal impacts, and with all the information, we create a..." zoom of the user's immune system." Ruedas further explains: "External load is the physical work the athlete undergoes and is measured with GPS and movement patterns, while internal load is the body's response to the exercise performed, with data such as heart rate, biomarkers of fatigue, inflammation, or perception of well-being."

Each cellular avatar integrates information about sleep, nutrition, physical activity, and immune response, allowing for the design of fully customized training and recovery plans. Furthermore, the system incorporates artificial intelligence and automated processes to detect subtle changes that may indicate inflammation or performance declines before they become apparent. Doctors monitor these parameters and can share them with the rest of the coaching staff to guide recommendations for specific training loads. In this regard, Rodes emphasizes: "We want to simulate environments that help us generate knowledge and improve injury prevention with personalized protocols." In fact, regarding this approach to sports medicine, the club recently commissioned genetic studies to better understand why players like Pedri and Dani Olmo are so prone to muscle injuries. The cellular avatars aim to standardize these types of resources.

Digital avatars in public healthcare

But how invasive are the methods used to generate avatars for the players? According to the experts consulted, not very. "Any biological study (blood, saliva, or urine) is always obtained with informed consent and under the supervision of ethics committees. And genetic analyses are performed for research purposes, without conducting genetic screenings of any athlete for sports decisions," Rodes assures. Regarding information on internal loads, Heyn says that data can be easily collected "with an Apple Watch" and then "compared with single cells" in the laboratory. Therefore, the athlete doesn't need to be involved; they only need to consent to their data being processed to create virtual models that can predict injuries and also determine the "biological age" of each body. "Elite athletes often underestimate their biological age, but I, who suffer from an autoimmune disease, am 42 years old in reality but have a biological age of 59," laments Vaswani, who lets slip a certain admiration for Robert Lewandowski's biological age, who will turn 3 this August. "I can assure you it's incredible," he concludes without elaborating. Regarding the democratization of this pioneering method, the CEO of Omniscope offers an interesting reflection. What would the cost be of implementing it in public healthcare? "When a person has cancer, a year of therapy can cost between €150,000 and €200,000 and it won't always be successful. The disease is very expensive, and its economic impact extends far beyond the individual. Therefore, if the focus is on prevention, perhaps everyone will benefit," Vaswani opines, reflecting on his experiences "caring for the elderly." Rodes, for his part, is more cautious: "If we optimize physical performance, prevent injuries, improve recovery, and promote safer physical activity, perhaps we can extend the sporting careers of our players."