Building Immune Digital Twins
Building Immune Digital Twins
Abstract
Digital twins, customized simulation models pioneered in industry, are beginning to gain ground in medicine and healthcare, with some major successes in cardiovascular diagnostics and in insulin pump control. Personalized computational models are also assisting in applications ranging from drug development to patient-tailored treatment optimization. Advanced medical digital twins will be essential to making precision medicine a reality. Because the immune system plays an important role in such a wide range of diseases and health conditions, from fighting pathogens to autoimmune disorders, digital twins of the immune system (IDTs) will have especially high impact. However, their development presents major challenges, stemming from the inherent complexity of the immune system and the difficulty of measuring many aspects of a patient’s immune state in vivo. A collaborative interdisciplinary effort involving immunologists, clinicians, mathematical modelers, and software engineers is required to achieve substantial progress.
The workshop Building Immune Digital Twins aims to make immune digital twin technology a reality. Over the course of three weeks, it will bring together researchers across disciplines for activities ranging from extended active team work on specific immune digital twin projects to lectures, discussion and working groups, and brainstorming sessions for new projects and applications. Over the course of the program, participants will develop a network of collaborators and experts in all relevant areas of research. The ultimate goal of the workshop is to help create a long-term interdisciplinary immune digital twin community, willing to take up the challenges of this exciting new field.
Organizing Committee
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Pr. Reinhard Laubenbacher (University of Florida)
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Dr Anna Niarakis (Genopole, University of Evry, University Paris-Saclay)
Professor Reinhard Laubenbacher is an expert in computational systems biology, whose work has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, resulting in over 160 publications. His current research focuses on the computational modeling and simulation of disease processes, in particular the role of the immune system in respiratory diseases. Dr Laubenbacher is a fellow of AAAS, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and the American Mathematical Society. Since 2016, he is serving as editor in chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the flagship journal of the Society for Mathematical Biology. He is the co-founder and co-lead of the NIH Working Group on Multiscale Modeling and Viral Pandemics.
Dr Anna Niarakis is an Associate Professor, HDR at UEVE, Paris-Saclay, affiliated with GenHotel, European Research Laboratory for Rheumatoid Arthritis, Genopole. She holds a 3-year delegation for research at INRIA, in the group Lifeware. She has a broad scientific background in Biochemistry, Biology, Pharmaceutical Technology and post-doctoral studies in Computational Systems Biology & Bioinformatics (ENS, Paris, Institut Gustave Roussy) with expertise in complex human diseases. She is a co-leader of the Disease Maps consortium coordinating the COVID19 Disease Map initiative, a coordinator of SysMod (Systems Modelling ), and an active member of CoLoMoTo (Consortium for Logical Modelling Tools).
