Digital Twins in Healthcare

Please close your eyes and imagine that you have a twin, a digital twin. Thanks to this digital twin, you can connect to your body from your tablet and understand what is going well and what is going wrong.

You can find the wildest ideas going through my mind under the subheading "Future perspective" at the end of this text. But before that, I invite you to discover what the concept of Digital Twins in health is in the "Scientific Perspective" section, and to read the section on the "Startup Ecosystem" to better understand who is doing what and what they will do as we dream. If you and your twin are ready, let's get started!

Hello, I am Elif Damla Karakolcu, and I am the Communications Director at Capital Cell. I publish a newsletter on LinkedIn, called BioRevolution, and in each issue, I highlight a 2035 biotech trend. We look at these topics from 3 different perspectives: Scientific, Market, and Future. Digital Twins in Healthcare is one of the most-read issues. Enjoy!

Scientific Perspective

Digital twins in healthcare are a revolutionary concept that brings the virtual and physical worlds closer together. It merges the virtual with the physical, offering advanced models that mirror patients or their organs. These models blend real-time and historical health data, processed by complex algorithms, to mimic real-life health scenarios. This blend helps doctors and researchers understand diseases better, try out treatments safely, and make medical research more accurate.

Creating a digital twin involves pulling together different kinds of health data, including patient records, biometric information, physical and mental health records, real-time physiological metrics, and medical images, to build a complete health picture. This digital model helps simulate how a patient might react to a treatment or a disease, offering a safe space for testing and research.

↪️(At each relevant physiological scale, known biology and relevant mechanisms are characterized through data collection that informs one or more computational models. The models at the individual scales are then integrated into a comprehensive multiscale base model. In the second step, this base model is personalized by parameterizing it with data collected from an individual patient. The resulting digital twin can then be used for clinical decision-making for this patient.)

Developing a digital twin is detailed work. It starts with gathering and combining health information to build a model that closely matches the patient's real condition. The accuracy of this model gets better over time by adding new data and refining the model with powerful software.

In the world of medicine, digital twins have a lot of promise. They can help drug companies predict how different people might react to their medicines, making the process of developing new drugs quicker and cheaper. They can also make clinical trials more reliable by forecasting how patients might respond to treatments, reducing the risk of unexpected side effects.

↪️(Digital twin instances of the same person or patient can be used for in silico testing and comparison of different treatment or preventive intervention possibilities to find out which option will work best for that particular individual. Note the data flow from clinical sensors, DNA sequencing, and other data sources and streams to the digital domain.)

Digital twins, enhanced by artificial intelligence, offer ongoing insights into health conditions, allowing for healthcare that's tailored to individual needs. This can lead to better health outcomes and improved life quality. However, creating and using digital twins also presents challenges, especially in ensuring data accuracy and maintaining privacy. To make digital twins as effective as possible, it's essential to use precise data and the right technology to spot and fix errors.

🪄Video suggestion.

The Human Digital Twin - Barcelona Supercomputing Center 

Startup ecosystem

-ELEM Biotech

Company based in Barcelona, Spain

Founded in 2018

ELEM Biotech is a biomedical simulation spin-off from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Their mission is to transform medical innovation, preclinical and clinical testing, regulatory approval, and treatment decisions. They aim to make medical testing work so that everyone, everywhere can be well, able, and active for life. Their cutting-edge technology revolves around creating high-definition anatomical information to construct digital avatars or populations of them. These avatars serve as platforms for testing medical devices or drugs. The heart of their work lies in the Virtual Humans simulation supercomputing cloud-deployed platform.

**ELEM raised 105.5% of its 1.200.000€ fundraising target in 2021 on Capital Cell.

-MDsim

Luxembourg-based company

Founded in 2022

Back pain affects up to 80% of people at some point in life, often due to aging, osteoporosis, or scoliosis. MDsim, founded by a professor of neurosurgery and three PhDs in computer modelling, aims to transform spine care with SPINEsim, an AI-powered digital twin technology. This software creates patient-specific models to prevent degeneration, personalise treatments, and improve surgical planning. As a certified medical software, SPINEsim supports care professionals to reduces risks, costs, and uncertainty—bringing precision medicine to spinal care and improving patient outcomes.

**MDsim raised 103.2% of its 1.950.000€ fundraising target in 2025 on Capital Cell.

Future Perspective

• Looking to the future, the scope of digital twins in healthcare is expected to broaden, driven by advancements in big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. These technologies will further refine the accuracy and applicability of digital twins, enabling more personalized and effective healthcare solutions. As this field evolves, digital twins are poised to become a cornerstone of precision medicine, revolutionizing the way healthcare is delivered and experienced.
• The use of digital twins in health can enable individuals to become more effective in personal health management. Imagine a world where you can get detailed information about your health from a screen on your tablet. At some point beyond its current state, it may give you a warning that you should drink more water when your body needs water. We can expect an increase in "conscious" drug consumption with that. The digital twin application can solve problems that can be solved without using medication, thanks to the on-site advice it gives.
• When planning your medication, your doctor can make more accurate decisions by estimating the amount of medication you will need. We can switch from buying boxed medicine to buying single medicine, which is an important step in medicine waste. By talking about "personalized medicine", we are addressing personalized treatments, and we are also taking an important step against the use of incorrect medications.
• I would like to mention that it will be groundbreaking in surgery planning and drug discovery. We can also observe our body moment by moment, thanks to biosensors developed and placed specifically for our chronic problems or genetically potential diseases. Nowadays, when we talk about the importance of preventive medicine, we can talk about the benefits of digital twins.

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