Building an international and interdisciplinary community to develop immune digital twins for complex human pathologies#

Authors#

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 Torres, Leonard A. Harris, T.J. Sego, Chase Cockrell, Amanda Shick, Hasan Balci, Albin Salazar, Kinza Rian, Ahmed 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

Abstract#

Digital twins in medicine are computational models that represent the health state of individual patients over time, enabling optimal therapeutics and forecasting patient prognosis, representing a key technology for personalised care. Many health conditions involve the immune system as an essential component, and hence, it is crucial to include its key features across spatial and temporal scales in medical digital twins. The immune response is complex and heterogeneous across diseases and patients, and its modelling requires the collective expertise of the international clinical, immunology, and computational modelling communities. A 2023 three-week workshop on immune digital twins brought together almost 100 researchers from these communities into a consortium to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and develop a detailed roadmap for immune digital twin modelling and application to be pursued over the next two years. This paper outlines the initial progress on immune digital twins achieved during the workshop and the environment that enabled effective communication between these three communities. Future steps include developing a repository of existing computational models related to the human immune system and developing infrastructure to construct complex disease models, including immune system components.