Building immune digital twins: An international and transdisciplinary community effort
Niarakis et al. (2025): Building immune digital twins: An international and transdisciplinary community effort
This paper introduces the concept of digital twins, which are called "promising tools for disease modelling and personalised healthcare" , and cites a couple of noteworthy examples, such as:
[T]he HeartFlow FFRCT Analysis [...] utilises patient-specific 3D computational models to non-invasively calculate fractional flow reserve from CT angiography, thereby avoiding invasive catheterisation procedures[. The] CardioInsight Mapping System (Medtronic) [...] employs personalised electrophysiological models for non-invasive cardiac mapping. Both systems have received FDA clearance and are routinely used in clinical practice. Beyond diagnostic applications, digital twins are actively improving procedural planning and treatment guidance through platforms like the HEARTguide (FEops nv, Belgium), which creates patient-specific models to predict outcomes of transcatheter aortic valve replacement, and the InHeart Platform, which uses patient-specific cardiac models to guide ventricular tachycardia ablation procedures. Current research, as demonstrated by Camps et al. in their cardiac digital twin pipeline, shows how patient-specific models can be automatically generated from routine clinical data to predict individual drug responses, with simulation results matching clinical trial data.
The artificial pancreas, "which has revolutionised the way patients with type 1 diabetes manage the disease" , consists of three components:
[T]he continuous glucose monitor, the algorithm, and the pump. These parts work together to mimic how a healthy pancreas regulates blood glucose. The device can monitor a person's blood glucose in real-time, automatically calculate and adjust the amount of insulin needed, and then inject it into the patient through a pump. The advantage of the closed-loop system is that the patient does not need to calculate the insulin dosage: the pumps are fully autonomous.
The development of immune digital twins (IDTs) "is particularly challenging due to the complexity of the immune system, the heterogeneity of immune system attributes between patients, and the difficulty of measuring the diverse aspects of an individual patient's (or a patient community's) immune state in vivo" .
The rest of the article describes the the Research Data Alliance's (RDA) Working Group on "Building Immune Digital Twins" (BIDT WG)'s "activities and a five-year plan, focused on data and model infrastructures, community building, and societal impact" .