Abstract
Digital twins, initially developed for industrial applications, are set to make significant advancements in medicine and healthcare. They have demonstrated promising potential for drug development and personalised care, especially in cardiovascular diagnostics and insulin-dependent diabetes management. A particularly compelling application lies in immune responses and immune-mediated diseases, given the immune system’s essential role in preserving human health, from fighting infections to managing autoimmune diseases. Creating Immune Digital Twins (IDTs) holds great promise for medicine and healthcare. At the same time, the development of a reliable and robust IDT presents significant challenges due to the inherent complexity and polymorphism of the human immune system, the difficulties in measuring patients’ immune state in vivo, and the intrinsic difficulties associated with modelling complex biological systems and processes.
The Working Group “Building Immune Digital Twins” (BIDT WG) aims to address these challenges by fostering transdisciplinary collaborations among immunologists, clinicians, experimentalists, computational biologists, and engineers. The international network aims to leverage its cross-disciplinary expertise for building the components required for a working IDT model. Moreover, the BIDT WG works towards creating an open-access model repository for publicly available immune-related computational models and their required metadata. The group is also active in cataloguing open-access tools, methodologies, and software to identify interoperability gaps in the current modelling landscape.
Consequently, this work can drive transformative innovations in precision medicine, unlocking new possibilities for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of immune-mediated diseases.