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Abstract Digital twins, customized simulation models pioneered in industry, are beginning to be deployed in medicine and healthcare, with some major successes, for instance in cardiovascular diagnostics and in insulin pump control. Personalized computational models are also assisting in applications ranging from drug development to treatment optimization. More advanced medical digital twins will be essential to making precision medicine a reality. Because the immune system plays an important role in such a wide range of diseases and health conditions, from fighting pathogens to autoimmune disorders, digital twins of the immune system will have an especially high impact. However, their development presents major challenges, stemming from the inherent complexity of the immune system and the difficulty of measuring many aspects of a patient’s immune state in vivo. This perspective outlines a roadmap for meeting these challenges and building a prototype of an immune digital twin. It is structured as a four-stage process that proceeds from a specification of a concrete use case to model constructions, personalization, and continued improvement.
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Immune digital twins for complex human pathologies: applications, limitations, and challenges
Abstract Digital twins represent a key technology for precision health. Medical digital twins consist of computational models that represent the health state of individual patients over time, enabling optimal therapeutics and forecasting patient prognosis. Many health conditions involve the immune system, so it is crucial to include its key features when designing medical digital twins. The immune response is complex and varies across diseases and patients, and its modelling requires the collective expertise of the clinical, immunology, and computational modelling communities. This review outlines the initial progress on immune digital twins and the various initiatives to facilitate communication between interdisciplinary communities. We also outline the crucial aspects of an immune digital twin design and the prerequisites for its implementation in the clinic. We propose some initial use cases that could serve as “proof of concept” regarding the utility of immune digital technology, focusing on diseases with a very different immune response across spatial and temporal scales (minutes, days, months, years). Lastly, we discuss the use of digital twins in drug discovery and point out emerging challenges that the scientific community needs to collectively overcome to make immune digital twins a reality.
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- PAR ID:
- 10589648
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- npj Systems Biology and Applications
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2056-7189
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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