Charlotte Bunne, assistant professor at EPFL in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences(IC) and School of Life Sciences (SV), has been awarded the prestigious Lopez-Loreta prize as the ETH Zurich laureate.The prize was awarded for her five-year project “Virtual Patient Labs: AI-Driven Simulation and Diagnostics for Precision Oncology”. At the center of the project is a single idea: the virtual patient. The aim is a working computational model of one person's biology, across the scales of molecules and cells to tissues and organs. By pulling a patient's many measurements into one in silico model, clinicians could simulate how a disease might progress and rehearse different treatments before choosing one. Bunne will carry out her research as an assistant professor at EPFL in her Artificial Intelligence in Molecular Medicine (AIMM) group.“Cancer care is full of counterfactual questions,” Bunne explains. “We observe what happens along the treatment path that is actually chosen, but not what might have happened under another therapy, at another time, or after a different diagnostic decision. Virtual patients are a way to make those alternatives computationally accessible. They allow us to move from describing a patient’s disease to asking how it could evolve under different interventions.”The work brings together three building blocks, validated across different patient cohorts: Multimodal foundation models to represent and integrate the full range of a patient's data; generative models to predict how a disease progresses and simulate the effect of different treatments; agentic decision-support tools to help uncover disease mechanisms, choose treatments and diagnostic tests, and pinpoint clinical decision variables. Bunne's team will test each piece in collaboration with the clinical partners behind the Virtual Patient Platform.The prize comes with €1 million, which will allow Bunne to hire more researchers to help her complete this important project.“Projects on this scale are enormously demanding because of the sheer volume and complexity of the data involved, the scale of the algorithmic development, the extensive evaluation required, and the need to operate in scientifically and technically uncharted territory.” she says. “The prize is what lets us grow the team to take it on, and we are deeply grateful for it. In addition, the project is possible because we also receive complementary computing grants from the Swiss Supercomputing Center via Swiss AI.”The Lopez-Loreta prize is awarded annually to four recent master or PhD graduates from EPFL, ETH Zurich, École Polytechnique in Palaiseau and ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse to finance outstanding projects over five years. Bunne is the laureate for ETH Zurich, where she completed her PhD in Computer Science in 2023 and she received the ETH medal for outstanding doctoral thesis. The prize is funded by the Jean-Jacques and Felicia Lopez-Loreta Foundation for academic excellence.