The future of in silico trials and digital twins in medicine

Abstract

In silico trials and digital twins are emerging as transformative medical technologies, as they offer a unique way to design medical innovations, optimize their application, and evaluate their utility. Their use spans from individual care - appropriating the technology for personalized decision, to population care - presenting an alternative to design, supplement, or replace clinical trials. They effectually offer a new way to efficiently qualify, quantify, and personalize healthcare innovations in advance or in conjunction with clinical application. While much progress is underway to advance these technologies across diverse developments, realizing their full potential requires a cohesive goal to unify separate activities towards a common objective. Such a cohesive goal - moonshot - can be defined as forming and fostering a digital twin of every single human person, owned by the individual, progressively updated with new data, and used to deliver optimized care, technology assessment, and real-world evidence. The feasibility of such a vision builds upon a growing body of work in computational modeling, regulatory science, and digital healthcare. Bringing this vision to reality requires ownership and active engagement of all stakeholders to contribute diverse expertise and resources for transforming medicine and medical appropriation towards a more accurate, efficient, and quantitative future.