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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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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Anna Niarakis
  • Reinhard Laubenbacher
  • Gary An
  • Yaron Ilan
  • Jasmin Fisher
  • Åsmund Flobak
  • Kristin Reiche
  • María Rodríguez Martínez
  • Liesbet Geris
  • Luiz Ladeira
  • Lorenzo Veschini
  • Michael L. Blinov
  • Francesco Messina
  • Luis L. Fonseca
  • Sandra Ferreira
  • Arnau Montagud
  • Vincent Noël
  • Malvina Marku
  • Eirini Tsirvouli
  • Marcella M. Torres
  • Leonard A. Harris
  • T.J. Sego
  • Chase Cockrell
  • Amanda E. Shick
  • Hasan Balci
  • Albin Salazar
  • Kinza Rian
  • Ahmed Abdelmonem Hemedan
  • Marina Esteban-Medina
  • Bernard Staumont
  • Esteban Hernandez-Vargas
  • Shiny Martis B
  • Alejandro Madrid-Valiente
  • Panagiotis Karampelesis
  • Luis Sordo Vieira
  • Pradyumna Harlapur
  • Alexander Kulesza
  • Niloofar Nikaein
  • Winston Garira
  • Rahuman S. Malik Sheriff
  • Juilee Thakar
  • Van Du T. Tran
  • Jose Carbonell-Caballero
  • Soroush Safaei
  • Alfonso Valencia
  • Andrei Zinovyev
  • James A. Glazier

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Industry / Biotechnology and Nanomedicine
  • Örebro University
  • Ghent University
  • Université de Liège
  • UC Leuven-Limburg
  • France
  • École normale supérieure de Cachan
  • Université de Toulouse
  • Institut Curie
  • University of Patras
  • Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases
  • Maastricht University
  • University of Luxembourg
  • University of 'Beira Interior'
  • Spain
  • Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies
  • Barcelona Supercomputing Center
  • Imperial College London
  • King's College London
  • University College London
  • European Bioinformatics Institute
  • Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
  • University of Leipzig
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology
  • St. Olavs Hospital, Trondheim University Hospital
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • South Africa
  • Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
  • Israel
  • University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
  • University of Connecticut Health Center
  • Yale University
  • University of Florida
  • University of Idaho
  • Indiana University at Bloomington
  • University of Rochester
  • University of Vermont
  • University of Richmond
  • The University of Auckland

Year

2024

Published in

npj Systems Biology and Applications

Volume

10

Issue

1

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository