Toward mechanistic medical digital twins: some use cases in immunology

Reinhard Laubenbacher; Fred Adler; Gary An; Filippo Castiglione; Stephen Eubank; Luis L Fonseca; James Glazier; Tomas Helikar; Marti Jett-Tilton; Denise Kirschner; Paul Macklin; Borna Mehrad; Beth Moore; Virginia Pasour; Ilya Shmulevich; Amber Smith; Isabel Voigt; Thomas E Yankeelov; Tjalf Ziemssen

doi:10.3389/fdgth.2024.1349595

Toward mechanistic medical digital twins: some use cases in immunology

Front Digit Health. 2024 Mar 7:6:1349595. doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2024.1349595. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Reinhard Laubenbacher¹, Fred Adler², Gary An³, Filippo Castiglione⁴, Stephen Eubank⁵, Luis L Fonseca¹, James Glazier⁶, Tomas Helikar⁷, Marti Jett-Tilton⁸, Denise Kirschner⁹, Paul Macklin⁶, Borna Mehrad¹, Beth Moore⁹, Virginia Pasour¹⁰, Ilya Shmulevich¹¹, Amber Smith¹², Isabel Voigt¹³, Thomas E Yankeelov^{14

15

16}, Tjalf Ziemssen¹³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States.
² Department of Mathematics and School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT, United States.
³ Department of Surgery, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States.
⁴ Biotechnology Research Center, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
⁵ Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States.
⁶ Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, United States.
⁷ Department of Biochemistry, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, United States.
⁸ U.S. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, MD, United States.
⁹ Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.
¹⁰ U.S. Army Research Office, Research Triangle Park, NC, United States.
¹¹ Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, United States.
¹² Department of Pediatrics, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN, United States.
¹³ Center for Clinical Neuroscience, Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital, Dresden, Germany.
¹⁴ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Austin, TX, United States.
¹⁵ Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Diagnostic Medicine, Oncology, The University of Texas, Austin, TX, United States.
¹⁶ Department of Imaging Physics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Austin, TX, United States.

Abstract

A fundamental challenge for personalized medicine is to capture enough of the complexity of an individual patient to determine an optimal way to keep them healthy or restore their health. This will require personalized computational models of sufficient resolution and with enough mechanistic information to provide actionable information to the clinician. Such personalized models are increasingly referred to as medical digital twins. Digital twin technology for health applications is still in its infancy, and extensive research and development is required. This article focuses on several projects in different stages of development that can lead to specific-and practical-medical digital twins or digital twin modeling platforms. It emerged from a two-day forum on problems related to medical digital twins, particularly those involving an immune system component. Open access video recordings of the forum discussions are available.

Keywords: immune digital twin; medical digital twin; personalized medicine; review of digital twin projects; roadmap.

Publication types

Review

Abstract

Publication types

Grants and funding