Health Digital Twins in Life Science and Health Care Innovation
Kaushik P. Venkatesh, Gabriel Brito, Maged N. Kamel Boulos
Abstract
Health digital twins (HDTs) are virtual representations of real individuals that can be used to simulate human physiology, disease, and drug effects. HDTs can be used to improve drug discovery and development by providing a data-driven approach to inform target selection, drug delivery, and design of clinical trials. HDTs also offer new applications into precision therapies and clinical decision making. The deployment of HDTs at scale could bring a precision approach to public health monitoring and intervention. Next steps include challenges such as addressing socioeconomic barriers and ensuring the representativeness of the technology based on the training and validation data sets. Governance and regulation of HDT technology are still in the early stages.