The Laboratory for Systems Medicine in the UF Department of Medicine is co-leading an international effort to develop digital twin technology for human diseases that involve the immune system. The effort began with a 2-day workshop at the UF Lake Nona campus in February 2023, bringing together a group of 20 international experts on the topic of immune digital twins and precision medicine.
The workshop was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. As a follow-on event, Reinhard Laubenbacher, the Laboratory director, co-organized a 3-week workshop at the Institut Pascal in Paris that brought together almost 100 scientists from 19 countries, primarily from Europe and the U.S. This community coalesced into the International Consortium for Immune Digital Twins, a world-wide community of clinicians, biologists, and mathematical modelers from academia, industry, and government.
The Consortium was recently accepted as an official working group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) a research community organization started in 2013 by the European Commission, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Department of Innovation. It has over 14,000 individual and 81 organizational members covering 152 countries. Dr. Laubenbacher serves as co-chair of the working group that will benefit from RDA resources and the community of members in carrying out its mission of building immune digital twin technology. The working group has also been dedicated as an official use case of the European Virtual Human Twin, a comprehensive roadmap, funded by the European Commission, for the development of digital twins in healthcare across Europe.
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