Digital twins Computer models that could soon personalise medical care

Imagine having a digital twin that gets ill, and can be experimented on to identify the best possible treatment, without you having to go near a pill or a surgeon's knife. Scientists believe that within five to 10 years, "in silico" trials - in which hundreds of virtual organs are used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs - could become routine, while patient-specific organ models could be used to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications.

- Linda Geddes

Digital twins are computational models of physical objects or processes, updated using data from their real-world counterparts. Within medicine, this means combining vast amounts of data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems with patients' personal data to create virtual models of their organs - and eventually, potentially their entire body.

"If you practise medicine today, a lot of it isn't very scientific," said Prof Peter Coveney, the director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London and a co-author of Virtual You. "Often, it is equivalent to driving a car and working out where to go next by looking in the rear-view mirror: you try to figure out how to treat the patient in front of you based on people you've seen in the past who had similar conditions.

"What a digital twin is doing is using your data inside a model that represents how your physiology and pathology is working. It is not  making decisions about you based on a population that might be completely unrepresentative. It is genuinely personalised."

The current state-of-the-art model can be found in cardiology.