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Review
. 2024 Mar 7:6:1349595.
doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2024.1349595. eCollection 2024.

Toward mechanistic medical digital twins: some use cases in immunology

Reinhard Laubenbacher  1 , Fred Adler  2 , Gary An  3 , Filippo Castiglione  4 , Stephen Eubank  5 , Luis L Fonseca  1 , James Glazier  6 , Tomas Helikar  7 , Marti Jett-Tilton  8 , Denise Kirschner  9 , Paul Macklin  6 , Borna Mehrad  1 , Beth Moore  9 , Virginia Pasour  10 , Ilya Shmulevich  11 , Amber Smith  12 , Isabel Voigt  13 , Thomas E Yankeelov  14   15   16 , Tjalf Ziemssen  13
Affiliations
Review

Toward mechanistic medical digital twins: some use cases in immunology

Reinhard Laubenbacher et al. Front Digit Health. .

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

TH: majority stakeholder in ImmuNovus, Inc and Discovery Collective, Inc. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. FA, FC, LF, TH, DK, PM, BM, VP, AS, and TZ declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Workflow for development of medical digital twins.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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