Forum on immune digital twins: a meeting report

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:10.1038/s41540-024-00345-5

Forum on immune digital twins: a meeting report

NPJ Syst Biol Appl. 2024 Feb 16;10(1):19. doi: 10.1038/s41540-024-00345-5.

Authors

Reinhard Laubenbacher¹, Fred Adler², Gary An³, Filippo Castiglione⁴, Stephen Eubank⁵, Luis L Fonseca⁶, James Glazier⁷, Tomas Helikar⁸, Marti Jett-Tilton⁹, Denise Kirschner¹⁰, Paul Macklin⁷, Borna Mehrad⁶, Beth Moore¹⁰, Virginia Pasour¹¹, Ilya Shmulevich¹², Amber Smith¹³, Isabel Voigt¹⁴, Thomas E Yankeelov^{15

16}, Tjalf Ziemssen¹⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. reinhard.laubenbacher@medicine.ufl.edu.
² Department of Mathematics and School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
³ Department of Surgery, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA.
⁴ Biotechnology Research Center, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
⁵ Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
⁶ Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
⁷ Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
⁸ Department of Biochemistry, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA.
⁹ U.S. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, MD, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
¹¹ U.S. Army Research Office, Research Triangle Park, Raleigh, NC, USA.
¹² Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, USA.
¹³ Department of Pediatrics, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN, USA.
¹⁴ Center of Clinical Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Medical Faculty and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Fetscherstraße 74, 01307, Dresden, Germany.
¹⁵ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Diagnostic Medicine, Oncology, The University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA.
¹⁶ Department of Imaging Physics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA.

Abstract

Medical digital twins are computational models of human biology relevant to a given medical condition, which are tailored to an individual patient, thereby predicting the course of disease and individualized treatments, an important goal of personalized medicine. The immune system, which has a central role in many diseases, is highly heterogeneous between individuals, and thus poses a major challenge for this technology. In February 2023, an international group of experts convened for two days to discuss these challenges related to immune digital twins. The group consisted of clinicians, immunologists, biologists, and mathematical modelers, representative of the interdisciplinary nature of medical digital twin development. A video recording of the entire event is available. This paper presents a synopsis of the discussions, brief descriptions of ongoing digital twin projects at different stages of progress. It also proposes a 5-year action plan for further developing this technology. The main recommendations are to identify and pursue a small number of promising use cases, to develop stimulation-specific assays of immune function in a clinical setting, and to develop a database of existing computational immune models, as well as advanced modeling technology and infrastructure.

Forum on immune digital twins: a meeting report

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Abstract

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